RDECOM Scientists Finding Ways to Safeguard Quantum Information

(Phys.org) RDECOM Research Laboratory scientists at the Army’s corporate research laboratory (ARL) have found a novel way to safeguard quantum information during transmission.The project is led by Drs. Daniel Jones, Brian Kirby, and Michael Brodsky from the laboratory’s Computational and Information Sciences Directorate. “We believe that this research has a potential to revolutionize cybersecurity and to enable secure secret sharing and authentication for the warfighter of the future,” Brodsky said. “In addition, it will have an impact on developing better sensors for position navigation and timing as well as quantum computers that might result in the synthesis of novel special materials with on demand properties.”
“We started with developing an understanding of how physical properties of real telecom fibers, such as inherent residual birefringence and polarization dependent loss, or PDL, affect the quality of quantum communications,” Jones said. “We exploited a novel mathematical approach, which has led to the development of a simple and elegant geometrical model of the PDL effects on polarization entanglement,” Kirby added.