Quantum Information Processing for Next-Generation Communication System Design
Sweta Sharma, Soumen Santra, Arpan Deyasi · 2024
At the most microscopic level, all physical systems are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Quantum information processing is the study of how information is gathered, transformed, and transmitted at the quantum level—in atoms, ions, photons, elementary particles, and microscopic solid-state systems, which obey fundamentally quantum mechanical laws. Quantum computers, quantum communication channels, and quantum sensors are devices that can attain the ultimate limits of information processing. The laws of quantum mechanics give rise to counterintuitive effects. Quantum information processors use “quantum weirdness” to perform tasks that classical information processors cannot. Quantum computers are conceived to process information stored on atomic, optical, and solid-state systems: they aim to use counterintuitive effects including quantum superposition and entanglement to perform tasks such as quantum simulation, quantum search, and factoring/code-breaking to solve problems that are hard or impossible on conventional classical computers. Quantum communication systems transmit information encoded in individual photons: they exploit the fact that quantum measurement is inevitably stochastic and destructive to enact quantum-encrypted communication whose security is guaranteed by the laws of physics. Quantum sensors and measurement devices operate at the greatest possible sensitivity and precision allowed by physical law: from magnetometers to quantum clocks to advanced gravitational interferometers (e.g., LIGO), quantum metrology supplies the techniques required to push measurement to its ultimate limits.