UC San Diego Receives Quantum Communications Research Grant
A team of researchers led by the University
of California, San Diego have won a
four-year, $2 million grant from the National
Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a quantum communication
system for secure transmissions over fiber optic cables.
While secure quantum communication has already been
demonstrated in laboratories, it is currently possible only at
extremely low temperatures using bulky equipment. Shayan Mookherjea, a
professor of electrical engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, and a team of researchers from the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Boston University, are working to
develop a low-energy, scalable, engineered quantum communication system
that uses entanglement over conventional optical fiber, according to a
news release.
The NSF funded this team, along with five other
interdisciplinary teams, as part of the Advancing Communication Quantum
Information Research in Engineering (ACQUIRE) research area, which is
part of the Emerging
Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) program of the
NSF Directorate for Engineering.
"This new NSF program will bring together many of our nation's
most innovative researchers in quantum photonics to launch a
coordinated attack on some of the most long-standing and high-value
research challenges in optics," said Mookherjea, in a prepared
statement.
Other members of Mookherjea's team include Paul Kwiat and
Virginia Lorenz, physics professors at the University of Illinois at
Urbana Champaign, and Alexander Sergienko, professor of electrical
engineering and physics at Boston University.
The goal of the ACQUIRE research projects is to develop a
quantum communication system on a chip that can operate at room
temperature using quantum-entangled photons over a fiber optic network.
Quantum communication offers unbreakable encryption, according to the
news release, and offers a potential solution to cybersecurity issues.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].