ECE Professor Emina Soljanin is the recipient of a new NSF award for the research project titled "Towards Full Photon Utilization by Adaptive Modulation and Coding on Quantum Links." This is a two-year $500,000 collaborative effort between Rutgers and UCLA.
In this project, Dr. Soljanin and her team advance secure quantum communications. Secure communication has long been an indispensable part of numerous systems, ranging from the more traditional such as finance and defense to the emerging ones such as the Internet of (battlefield) Things and health data management. The main advantage of private key encryption over the currently popular methods is that as long as the key bits are truly secret, it is provably secure, that is, insensitive to advances in classical and quantum computing algorithms. A Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocol describes how two parties, commonly referred to as Alice and Bob, can establish a secret key by communicating over a quantum and a public classical channel when both channels can be accessed by an eavesdropper Eve. For the widespread adoption of QKD, it is mandatory to provide high key rates over long distances. What has emerged as a bottleneck in practice is the inability to maximize the utility of information-bearing quantum states. This project seeks to solve this inefficiency problem for frequency-time entanglement based QKD. The results will pave the way for practical quantum networks in which multiple Bobs communicate with Alice simultaneously though a multi-channel entanglement distribution in the presence of multiple Eves.
You can find more details on the project at the NSF page here.
Congratulations Emina!