A scientist at Heriot-Watt University has been awarded £2.5m from the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies programme.
Professor Mehul Malik is harnessing the mysterious properties of quantum entanglement to develop new network technologies capable of delivering the most secure form of communication - and potentially making it almost impossible for cyber criminals to access sensitive data.
Key to its success is the ability to utilise what is known as quantum entanglement. This is when two particles, such as light photons, remain strongly connected over enormous distances.
While this technology offers unconditional data security, it is notoriously susceptible to background interference, known as noise. This can include weather or signal loss in a communications network that jeopardise the security of a quantum network.
To counter this, Malik and his team are developing advanced methods to control the quantum structure of light in space and time.
He explained: “My research aims to harness these high-dimensional properties of light to maximise the information capacity of a quantum network and simultaneously enable it to operate in a noisy, real-world environment.
“With support from project partners BT Group and the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, my 10-year research programme is poised to take fundamental advances developed in my lab and translate them to technologies that will have a direct impact on our modern society.”
Malik is one of only four academics in the UK to be recognised through the Royal Academy programme to lead on developing emerging technologies with high potential to deliver economic and social benefits.
Funded by the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the scheme aims to identify global research visionaries and provide them with long-term support. Each £2.5m award covers employment and research costs, enabling researchers to focus on advancing their technology over a period of up to a decade.
Malik added: “We have made tremendous strides in fundamental quantum science in recent years and I am particularly excited about the opportunities offered by the Royal Academy of Engineering to help us translate this work into disruptive applications."
The news follows yesterday's announcement that scientists at Heriot-Watt University have published new research into quantum entanglement.
Researchers at the university's Institute of Photonic and Quantum Sciences, working with colleagues at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, have developed a way for quantum entanglement to survive and remain robust under even extreme conditions of noise and loss.
Professor Malik and his research team at the Beyond Binary Quantum Information Lab were able to improve the robustness of entanglement by using photons entangled in multiple dimensions (qudits), compared to the standard two-dimensional quantum units (qubits). This ‘high-dimensional’ entanglement uses the spatial structure of light to entangle photons in a 53-dimensional space made up of ‘pixels’ of light.
In a test, the researchers were able to steer the entangled photons through loss and noise conditions equivalent to 79km of telecoms fibre optic cable, with 36% of 'white noise' – noise that could come from sunlight leaking into the experiment, for example.
Another finding from the research was that, counter-intuitively, increasing the number of dimensions in quantum entanglement also dramatically reduces the time it takes to measure the results.
“The efficient and trusted flow of information lies at the heart of modern society today,” Malik said. “In the future, quantum networks will provide a way to have ultra-secure, high-capacity communication, to build such a ‘quantum’ internet, we need to be able to send quantum entanglement across real-world distances – and the only way you can do that is by tolerating noise and loss.”
Quantum technology involves harnessing the physics of sub-atomic particles to develop high performance applications, including more powerful computing, more secure communications and more reliable navigation systems.
Malik added: “Quantum technology is very much an emerging area that’s being advanced by both academia and industry, and I think our research is incredibly relevant to both.”
The research is funded by the QuantERA Programme, a European network of 39 Research Funding Organisations from 31 countries; the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) - the main funding body for engineering and physical sciences research in the UK; the European Research Council (ERC) - the European Union’s funding organisation for frontier research - and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
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