Towards the Quantum Internet: Building an Entanglement-sharing Quantum Network

Professor Eden Figueroa, Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Lab presenting live in G101

In-person in Goergen 101 and Zoom

Abstract

The goal of quantum communication is to transmit quantum statesbetween distant sites. The key aspect to achieve this goal is the generation of entangled states over long distances. Such states can then be used to faithfully transfer classical and quantum states via quantum teleportation. This is an exciting new direction which establishes the fundamentals of a new quantum internet. The big challenge, however, is that the entanglement rates generated between two distant sites decreases exponentially with the length of the connecting channel. To overcome this difficulty, the new concepts of entanglement swapping, and quantumrepeater operation are needed.

In this talk we will show our progress towards building a quantum network of many quantum devices capable of distributing entanglement over long distances connecting Stony Brook University and the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. We will show how to produce photonic quantum entanglement in the laboratory and how to store it and distribute it by optically manipulating the properties of atomic clouds. Finally, we will discuss our recent experiments in which several quantum devices are already interconnected forming an elementary version of a quantum-enabled internet.

Biography

Eden Figueroa was awarded his BSc in Engineering Physics and his MSc inOptical Engineering at Monterrey Tech,Mexico in 2000 and 2002 respectively. From 2003 to 2008, he was a PhD student in the Quantum Technology Group of Professor A. I. Lvovsky at the University of Konstanz in Germany and later at the Institute for Quantum Information Science at the University of Calgary, Canada. His PhD thesis entitled: “A quantum memory for squeezed light” was one of the first experimental implementations of quantum memory for quantized light fields. In 2009, he joined the Quantum Dynamics Group of Professor G. Rempe at the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik in Garching, Germany where he worked in implementation of quantum networks utilizing single-atomstrapped in high-finesse optical cavities.Starting in 2013 he has been an Associate Professor and the Group leader of the Quantum Information Technology group at Stony Brook University, where he has developed scalable room temperature quantum memories and entanglement sources, aiming to constructing the firstworking prototype of a quantum repeaternetwork. Since Jan. 2019, Professor Figueroais also joint appointment with the Instrumentation Division and the Computer Science Initiative at Brookhaven National Laboratories. The collaboration between Stony Brook and BNL is developing the Long Island Quantum Information Distribution Network (LIQuIDNet), a first prototype of a quantum network distributing photonic entanglement over long distances.