Quantum Physics

   

Secure Quantum Communications

Authors: George Rajna

A protocol for secure quantum communications has been demonstrated over a record-breaking distance of 404 km. [16] Randomness is vital for computer security, making possible secure encryption that allows people to communicate secretly even if an adversary sees all coded messages. Surprisingly, it even allows security to be maintained if the adversary also knows the key used to the encode the messages. [15] Researchers at the University of Rochester have moved beyond the theoretical in demonstrating that an unbreakable encrypted message can be sent with a key that's far shorter than the message—the first time that has ever been done. [14] Quantum physicists have long thought it possible to send a perfectly secure message using a key that is shorter than the message itself. Now they’ve done it. [13] What once took months by some of the world's leading scientists can now be done in seconds by undergraduate students thanks to software developed at the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing, paving the way for fast, secure quantum communication. [12] The artificial intelligence system's ability to set itself up quickly every morning and compensate for any overnight fluctuations would make this fragile technology much more useful for field measurements, said co-lead researcher Dr Michael Hush from UNSW ADFA. [11] Quantum physicist Mario Krenn and his colleagues in the group of Anton Zeilinger from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have developed an algorithm which designs new useful quantum experiments. As the computer does not rely on human intuition, it finds novel unfamiliar solutions. [10] Researchers at the University of Chicago's Institute for Molecular Engineering and the University of Konstanz have demonstrated the ability to generate a quantum logic operation, or rotation of the qubit, that - surprisingly—is intrinsically resilient to noise as well as to variations in the strength or duration of the control. Their achievement is based on a geometric concept known as the Berry phase and is implemented through entirely optical means within a single electronic spin in diamond. [9] New research demonstrates that particles at the quantum level can in fact be seen as behaving something like billiard balls rolling along a table, and not merely as the probabilistic smears that the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests. But there's a catch - the tracks the particles follow do not always behave as one would expect from "realistic" trajectories, but often in a fashion that has been termed "surrealistic." [8] Quantum entanglement—which occurs when two or more particles are correlated in such a way that they can influence each other even across large distances—is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but occurs in various degrees. The more a quantum state is entangled with its partner, the better the states will perform in quantum information applications. Unfortunately, quantifying entanglement is a difficult process involving complex optimization problems that give even physicists headaches. [7] A trio of physicists in Europe has come up with an idea that they believe would allow a person to actually witness entanglement. Valentina Caprara Vivoli, with the University of Geneva, Pavel Sekatski, with the University of Innsbruck and Nicolas Sangouard, with the University of Basel, have together written a paper describing a scenario where a human subject would be able to witness an instance of entanglement—they have uploaded it to the arXiv server for review by others. [6]

Comments: 26 Pages.

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[v1] 2016-11-03 09:36:56

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