Alignment-Free Quantum Communication
Researcher from ICFO collaborate to report on new technique in Nature Communications.
August 31, 2012
ICFO researcher Leandro Aolita, in collaboration with researchers Prof. Fabio Sciarrino, Eleonora Nagali, and Vincenzo D'Ambrosio, from de Sapienza Università di Roma, Sergei Slussarenko and Prof. Lorenzo Marrucci, from Università di Napoli, and Prof. Stephen Walborn, from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, has recently reported in Nature Communications on the experimental demonstration of a quantum communication scheme free of alignment between sender and receiver. The technique lifts some of the more stringent requirements for practical quantum communication, and may be useful for satellite-based experiments.
The main ingredients are single-photon states that are invariant under rotations and therefore immune to any misalignment around the propagation direction. These states are entangled in the polarization and orbital angular momentum degrees of freedom, and are efficiently created and detected using a novel liquid-crystal device, called the q-plate. The technique can be applied to generic quantum communication protocols, including for instance quantum teleportation or quantum repeaters, all misalignment immune.
Until very recently, Dr. Leandro Aolita worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Quantum Information Theory group at ICFO led by Prof. Antonio Acín. He is currently on the move to Freie Universität Berlin as a Marie Curie fellow.
The main ingredients are single-photon states that are invariant under rotations and therefore immune to any misalignment around the propagation direction. These states are entangled in the polarization and orbital angular momentum degrees of freedom, and are efficiently created and detected using a novel liquid-crystal device, called the q-plate. The technique can be applied to generic quantum communication protocols, including for instance quantum teleportation or quantum repeaters, all misalignment immune.
Until very recently, Dr. Leandro Aolita worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Quantum Information Theory group at ICFO led by Prof. Antonio Acín. He is currently on the move to Freie Universität Berlin as a Marie Curie fellow.