SUPA St Andrews Crests

Theoretical Quantum Information Group

Research Activities:

COMPAS - Computing with Mesoscopic Photonic and Atomic States

The Theoretical Quantum Information group is a member of the European Union funded COMPAs project. The focus of the COMPAS project has been presented in the "Project Summary":

COVAQIAL

"In recent years, so called continuous variables (CV) have emerged as a viable and extremely promising alternative to the traditional quantum bit-based approaches to quantum information processing. Encoding CV information onto mesoscopic carriers, such as the quadrature components of light modes or the collective spin degrees of freedom of atoms, has proven to offer several distinct advantages, making CV a tool of major importance for the development of future informational and computational systems. Several experimental breakthroughs have been achieved that support this promise, for example, the deterministic generation of entangled or squeezed states in optical parametric amplifiers, the high-rate quantum distribution of secret keys using off-the-shelve telecom components, or the highly efficient coupling of light with atoms, allowing the demonstration of a quantum memory for light as well as the inter-species quantum teleportation. The toolbox of operations that are available for the manipulation of mesoscopic CV states has even been recently extended with the conditional photon subtraction, which enabled the generation of non-classical states with negative Wigner functions. This has opened access to the realm of non-Gaussian operations, which are essential to several critical applications such as CV entanglement distillation or CV quantum computing. In view of these recent spectacular achievements, due, for many of them, to members of the present consortium, all conditions appear to be met today for the success of a focused research project that explores the various opportunities offered by this CV toolbox to reach concrete informational and computational goals. " - Source: COMPAS

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