Communications of the ACM
Breakthrough Technology to Improve Cybersecurity
A collaboration by physicists and electrical engineers has yielded a breakthrough in generating single photons as carriers of quantum information in security systems.
Credit: The Marshalltown
A collaborative project between physicists at the University of Sydney's Center for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) and electrical engineers from the School of Electrical and Information Engineering has yielded a major breakthrough in generating single photons as carriers of quantum information in security systems.
Photons are generated simultaneously in pairs, each in one of the photon streams, and the detection of photons in one stream signals the timing information of those in the other. By tapping this data, a proper timing control is dynamically applied to those photons so they appear at regular intervals.
This new method boosts the rate of photons at the regular interval, which is very useful for quantum secure communication and quantum photonic computation.
"This research has demonstrated that the odds of being able to generate a single photon can be doubled by using a relatively simple technique--and this technique can be scaled up to ultimately generate single photons with 100-percent probability," says lead author Chunle Xiong.
CUDOS director and professor Ben Eggleton predicts single-photon generation "will drive the development of local secure communications systems--for safeguarding defense and intelligence networks, the financial security of corporations and governments, and bolstering personal electronic privacy." He reports the demonstration exploits a photonic chip CUDOS has been developing over the last 10 years.
From Phys.Org
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