Webinar Bridging Frontiers: Interfacing Platforms for a Global Quantum Internet

The webinar ‘Bridging Frontiers: Interfacing Platforms for a Global Quantum Internet’ will take place on October 16 2024 at 16:00 CET and will discuss the foundational components of quantum networks, focusing on the key areas of memory, source, and detection.

By understanding how these elements interact, we’ll uncover ways to optimize and enhance the performance of quantum communication systems. In the memory part, we’ll explore how quantum information is stored and maintained, which is important for improving network efficiency. The source part will focus on the generation of entangled photons, a vital process that directly impacts the performance and design of the network. Lastly, the detection part will examine how quantum states are measured, ensuring accurate and reliable communication. Together, these parts will illustrate how these elements work in together to build more effective quantum networks.

Elements of a quantum repeater have been developed individually since the late 1980’s, when the first source of entangled photon-pairs was experimentally demonstrated. Later, systems capable of generating entanglement between light and matter, both emissively and absorptively, were also developed. The initial architectures of a quantum network have been devised taking into account the interaction between multiples of the same class of devices, mainly due to the specificity of their quantum optical interfaces (wavelength, bandwidth, wave-packet shape, and encoding).

These architectures, homogeneous ones, suffer from inefficiencies intrinsic to each platform: in order to optimize the entanglement distribution rates, an architecture must maximize the capacity of the available quantum channel, which amounts to an efficient usage of the available time-bandwidth product of the architecture. Individually, platforms with long storage times are restricted to narrow bandwidths; conversely, platforms that offer higher rates due to spectral broadness are severely limited in their storage times, or even quantum information processing capacity. Heterogeneous quantum repeater architectures offer flexibility through the interfacing of distinct platforms, potentially leading to higher performance due to a more optimal channel utilization.

However, interfacing different systems will only provide benefits if the hardware overhead required to match the platforms is efficient. In this webinar, we will review the types of systems one could use to build a quantum network, the architecture choices that they unfold, and what are the benefits and challenges associated to connecting them together.