A step closer to a data superhighway for future internet

A step closer to a data superhighway for future internet
An artist's impression of the research team's innovative system of detectors along quantum circuits to monitor light particles. Credit: Kai Wang, ANU

An international team of researchers led by ANU is helping to build a safe data superhighway for the highly anticipated quantum internet, which promises a new era of artificial intelligence and ultra-secure communication.

Associate Professor Andrey Sukhorukov said the data being shared on this future internet would be stored in , which can store vast amounts of information.

"The light particles move really fast so, for quality-control purposes, we've developed a way to monitor and measure them along quantum circuits, which are like superhighways for the light particles to travel along," said Associate Professor Sukhorukov, who led the research with a team of scientists at the Nonlinear Physics Centre of the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.

Kai Wang, a Ph.D. scholar at the Nonlinear Physics Centre who worked on all aspects of the project, said measuring light particles can interfere with the operation of the quantum circuit so the team needed to find a solution to this challenge.

The team designed an innovative system of detectors along the quantum circuits to monitor light particles without losing the information that they are storing, by preserving the being transmitted.

"We guided light particles to two parallel paths, like two lanes on a highway: one lane has a faster speed limit than the other one, and light particles can freely change their lanes," Mr Wang said.

"Along both lanes there are several detectors to simultaneously check exactly how many light particles were passing these detectors at the same time."

Through repeated detections, the researchers gained a comprehensive picture of these light particles as they entered and then subsequently left the detection zones.

"We lost just a tiny fraction of the light particles through this process, without affecting the state of the transmitted light particles," Mr Wang said.

"Our detection system can be built into a large, integrated network of , to help monitor in real time."

The collaborating research group led by Professor Alexander Szameit at the University of Rostock in Germany tested the feasibility of this new approach in experiments with custom-designed fabricated optical circuits.

The research is published in Optica.

More information: Kai Wang et al. Inline detection and reconstruction of multiphoton quantum states, Optica (2019). DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.6.000041

Journal information: Optica

Citation: A step closer to a data superhighway for future internet (2019, January 10) retrieved 28 March 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2019-01-closer-superhighway-future-internet.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

Explore further

Tiny camera lens may help link quantum computers to network

287 shares

Feedback to editors