Making the Ultra-Secure More Ultra-Secure at the University of Chicago and University of York (Yale University, too)
Choosy resource allocation improves energy efficiency in quantum communications
Excerpts and salient points ~
+ “When we send light through a channel some part of it might be lost along the way,” said the paper’s lead author, Kyungjoo Noh, a new Ph.D. graduate from Yale University and a visiting researcher at UChicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. “You might get only, say, 80 or 90 percent of it. Those kinds of attenuations are what we’re dealing with here.”
Now, researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of York have detailed a new strategy for securely boosting the successful transmission rates of quantum information.
+ The UChicago-Yale-York team seeks to design an information coding scheme that will operate in the presence of imperfections such as energy loss. The team’s new paper assesses the limitations presented by factors such as energy loss and thermal noise and identifies strategies to negate these impacts.
+ In particular, the team investigated quantum communication in a low-energy environment, one that transmits a relatively small number of light particles, as this has been shown to successfully increase communication rates. While, in principle, highly energetic states might allow researchers to send more photons and therefore more information, previous work has shown reduced communication rates as photon numbers increase due to limited controllability of high-energy states. The researchers therefore opted for a practical scenario: sending communications with a lower-energy state and fewer photons that they could reliably control.
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