A new quantum era: from quantum optics to quantum technologies

J. Mlynek

Markus Aspelmeyer

Dan E. Browne, Sougato Bose, Florian Mintert +1 more

Stephen M. Barnett, Almut Beige, Artur Ekert +17 more

Keizo Murakami, Atsushi Taniguchi, Fumiaki Kudo +7 more

In the January 2022 issue of NTT Technical Review, we introduced the secure optical transport network for enabling secure optical transport even in the era of quantum computers.In this article, two concepts, cryptographic agility and Multi-Factor Security, which are key factors in the transition from current cryptographic techniques to quantum-resistant cryptographic techniques and need to be considered in the era of quantum computers, are explained, and our efforts to incorporate these concepts into secure optical transport networks (i.e., elastic-key-control technology and disaggregation technology for cryptographic processing) are introduced.

Tatjana Curcic, Mark E. Filipkowski, Almadena Chtchelkanova +4 more

As classical information technology approaches limits of size and functionality, practitioners are searching for new paradigms for the distribution and processing of information. Our goal in this Introduction is to provide a broad view of the beginning of a new era in information technology, an era of quantum information, where previously underutilized quantum effects, such as quantum superposition and entanglement, are employed as resources for information encoding and processing. The ability to distribute these new resources and connect distant quantum systems will be critical. We present an overview of network implications for quantum communication applications, and for quantum computing. This overview is a selection of several illustrative examples, to serve as motivation for the network research community to bring its expertise to the development of quantum information technologies.