Towards quantum networks of entangled sensors

Luca Pezzè

Carlos Antonio Ayala Tlalolini, Yunia Verónica García‐Tejeda, Victor Barrera-Figueroa +1 more

Eden V. Figueroa

Emily A. Van Milligen, Christos N. Gagatsos, Eneet Kaur +2 more

One of the most promising applications of quantum networks is entanglement-assisted sensing. The field of quantum metrology exploits quantum correlations to improve the precision bound for applications such as precision timekeeping, field sensing, and biological imaging. When measuring multiple spatially distributed parameters, current literature focuses on quantum entanglement in the discrete-variable case and quantum squeezing in the continuous-variable case, distributed amongst all of the sensors in a given network. However, it can be difficult to ensure that all sensors preshare entanglement of sufficiently high fidelity. This work probes the space between fully entangled and fully classical sensing networks by modeling a star network with probabilistic entanglement generation that is attempting to estimate the average of local parameters. The quantum Fisher information is used to determine which protocols best utilize entanglement as a resource for different network conditions. It is shown that without entanglement distillation there is a threshold fidelity below which classical sensing is preferable. For a network with a given number of sensors and links characterized by a certain initial fidelity and probability of success, this work outlines when and how to use entanglement, when to store it, and when it needs to be distilled.

Amit Kumar Mohapatra, S. Balakrishnan

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can take the advantages by utilizing the security schemes based on the concepts of quantum computation and cryptography. However, quantum wireless sensor networks (QWSNs) are shown to have many practical constraints. One of the constraints is the number of entangled qubits which is very high in the quantum security scheme proposed by [Nagy et al., Nat. Comput. 9 (2010) 819]. In this work, we propose a modification of the security scheme introduced by Nagy et al. and hence the reduction in the number of entangled qubits is shown. Further, the modified scheme can overcome some of the constraints in the QWSNs.

Xueshi Guo, Casper R. Breum, Johannes Borregaard +6 more