Sunday, February 19, 2012
A panel of leading experts from around the world discussed the future of quantum communications during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Vancouver.
Ultra-secure quantum communications systems will soon likely go into orbit, according to a panel of world-leading experts — including IQC researchers Raymond Lafamme and Thomas Jennewein — who explored the topic Sunday during a major scientific conference in Vancouver.
Laflamme and Jennewein were joined by Anton Zeilinger (University of Vienna) and Masahide Sasaki (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan) at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
In their session, titled "Quantum Information Technologies: A New Era for Global Communication," the researchers explored the various avenues each is investigating to carry out secure quantum communications in space via satellite.
"If we can build these quantum cryptography systems and make them global, we can transfer information in such a way that, if there's a hacker, we will know about it and protect against it," said Laflamme.
Holding a 3D model of a satellite that could create quantum communications links with ground stations on earth, Thomas Jennewein said "quantum satellites are the last missing link for the vision of having global quantum networks."
Jennewein envisions satellites used for both practical communications purposes and for fundamental experiments to test the predictions of quantum mechanics.
"We could compare our results to theory — for example, does quantum entanglement follow expected behaviour, or do we have something unknown going on?" Jennewein said.
Sasaki said quantum cryptography has already "crossed the valley of death" — that is, gone beyond speculation and been established as a viable technology — and said it now "needs to be installed into practical networks."
The security of important data, from medical records to finance, needs to be protected by quantum cryptography in the future, Sasaki said.
The entire session was recorded and shared on the IQC YouTube channel.