Felix Leditzky, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, is co-principal investigator on a research project on quantum systems that was recently awarded $2.5 million dollars from the National Science Foundation.
Quantum systems offer exciting new possibilities for communication and computing problems. A crucial feature of quantum systems that sets them apart from the classical world is entanglement, a particularly strong form of correlation between different parts of the system. Photons (“light particles”) provide an important example of such a multipartite quantum system, but the efficient generation, characterization, and transformation of multi-photon entangled states remains an outstanding challenge.
In this project, a cross-disciplinary team consisting of mathematicians, information theorists, quantum physicists, photonic engineers, and material scientists will develop a set of new technologies for creating, evaluating, and using multi-photon entangled states in quantum communication applications. The main goals of this project are (1) to experimentally demonstrate a recently discovered theoretical method of producing multi-photon entangled states in the laboratory, (2) develop efficient methods of certifying the state preparation process, and (3) find new protocols for quantum communication and networking based on these multi-photon entangled states.
The project’s principal investigator, Shuo Sun, is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.