Events

Past Event

EE Seminar: The Quantum Network

November 16, 2021
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Event time is displayed in your time zone.
Davis Auditorium OR Live stream

Speaker: Prof. Saikat Guha
Location: HYBRID event!
(You must have a current Columbia ID card and a green pass to attend in person)
Hosted by: Keren Bergman

Abstract

Many organized efforts across the world are racing to realize the "Quantum Internet" -- the internet of the future that has been upgraded to provide an additional service: that of reliably transmitting qubits between distant users. Just like the internet's classical data communications service, the quantum communications service must reliably support many simultaneous user groups, and support diverse and dynamic applications---each with its unique requirements on the quality of service for transmission of qubits, e.g., rate, latency, fidelity etc. Supporting long-distance quantum communications at high rates and fidelities will require scalable quantum repeaters and quantum-capable satellites for continental-scale quantum connectivity. In this lecture, I will describe the underlying theory of quantum networking and quantum repeaters, allude to a few important applications, and give a glimpse of a large effort underway as part of an NSF-funded 10-year engineering research center called the Center for Quantum Networks (CQN). CQN is a highly interdisciplinary effort with research ranging material-science theory to design high-coherence time quantum memories, quantum memory design and fabrication, building efficient interfaces between matter and photon qubits, cryogenic compatible packaging capabilities, quantum error correction theory to design codes for quantum communication and entanglement distillation, repeater architecture design and analysis, the entire network protocol stack up to the application layer, and finally network control, tomography and management protocols. I will also mention how CQN engages disciplines such as law and policy, social and behavioral sciences and economics through a research thrust focusing on societal impacts of the quantum internet.

Bio

Saikat Guha is a Professor at the College of Optical Sciences, jointly appointed with the ECE Department at The University of Arizona, Tucson. He is the Director of the National Science Foundation ERC, Center for Quantum Networks. Prior to joining the University of Arizona, he was a Lead Scientist with the Quantum Information Processing group at Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA, where he worked from 2008 to 2017. Saikat received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, India, in 2002, and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2004 and 2008, respectively.

Saikat's research interest is in investigating fundamental quantum-theoretic limits on photonics-based information processing, with applications to communications, imaging and computation; and in designing system realizations that can attain those performance limits. His current research focuses on quantum repeaters and network architectures for long-distance entanglement distribution, super-resolution imaging using adaptive spatial-mode sorters, entanglement-enhanced photonic sensing and communications, and quantum computing using photonic qubits.