CS@CU Distinguished Lecture Series
Quantum Networks: A Classical Perspective
Don Towsley
Abstract:
Quantum information processing is at the threshold of having significant impact on technology and society in the form of providing unbreakable security, ultra-high-precision distributed sensing, and polynomial/exponential speed-ups in computing. Many of these applications are enabled by high rate distributed shared entanglement between pairs and groups of users. A critical missing component that prevents crossing this threshold is a distributed infrastructure in the form of a world-wide “Quantum Internet”. This motivates the study of quantum networks, namely, to identify the right architecture and how should it operate, e.g., dynamic fair allocation of resources. Moreover, the architecture and network operation must account for operation in harsh, noisy environments.
This talk addresses the following question: what ideas can the design of a quantum network borrow from classical networks? At first glance the answer appears to be “very little”. The focus of this talk, however, is to argue that the opposite is true and that much can be borrowed from classical networks. We begin by reviewing two proposed quantum network architectures two-way and one-way architectures. A two-way network generates and distributes quantum entanglement to pairs or groups of users whereas a one-way network allows for direct transfer of quantum information from one user to another. We compare these architectures and conclude that a two-way architecture is superior. A two-way architecture appears very different from the classical Internet architecture. However, we will introduce a “connectionless” two-way quantum network architecture that allows one to easily adapt many ideas from classical networks (good and bad ). We provide several examples of the adoption of good ideas and conclude with open research questions.
