Applications of photonic quantum information technologies

Photonic implementations of quantum information are the most versatile in terms of real-world implementations across a breadth of applications, from sensing and imaging to secure communications and computing.

This project will explore new applications that reap an advantage in information processing where quantum information is encoded in photonic qubits or in the phase, amplitude/squeezing parameters of Gaussian quantum states of light.

One class of applications are those which rely on solving problems in graph theory to yield an advantage over classical information processing such as finding dense subgraphs and max-cliques.

Examples of applications include molecular docking for drug discovery and clustering algorithms in finance for optimal trading strategies.

These graph problems can be solved using a Gaussian Boson Sampling device where coherent states and squeezed states interfere in a linear optical network of beamsplitters and phase shifters followed by Fock measurements.

Along with fibre-coupled high-gain squeezed light sources, linear networks constructed from photonic integrated circuits in materials such as SiN and thin-film LiNbO3 will be used to implement reconfigurable circuits. Time-bin encoding will be utilised to achieve greater scale in a resource efficient manner.