The next frontier of quantum communications

Listening to Rupert Ursin's closing talk on Free-Space Quantum Communication towards Satellites. 

Over the last week, we shared the sunset from the summit of Mauna Kea, tracked binary star clusters and shining nebulae from telescopes atop the mountain, joined a round of native Hawaiian chants to give thanks to the land, the jungle and our ancestors in a hand-built, solar-powered treehouse deep in the rainforest — snorkeled through the same crystalline waters as the sea turtles and dolphins in Waikoloa Bay, enjoyed fresh coconut water and enchanted conversations on quantum mechanics and the nature of reality as whirling dervishes, beautiful dancers flitted around us at the naked drum circle of Kehena's black sand beach — took in arms-length views of active cliffside lava flows and giant, billowing sulfuric gas clouds, violently heaving and shaking the ground beneath our feet, erupting into massive steam columns as they crashed into the ocean, slicing through the thin ribbon of coastline interface between land and sea, dead in the middle of the night, miles from civilization ... 

The Next Frontier of Quantum Communications — with Richard Hughes, Tim Ralph, Wolfgang Tittel, Jaewan Kim and Masahide Sasaki at the IEEE Quantum Photonics and Communications Meeting, Hilton Waikoloa, Hawaii

Alan Aspuru-Guzik granted tenure at Harvard University "Breaking news: I just found out I got tenure 10 minutes ago. Thanks to all my friends for their support!"
— Alan Aspuru-Guzik

Quantum physicist Andrew White among new Australian Academy of Science Fellows University of Queensland  "Professor White  has built an international reputation through his work in quantum physics. His characterization of a quantum logic gate, the fundamental building block of a quantum computer, has set the standard in the field. His research has been published extensively in numerous high-profile journals such as Nature Communications, Science, Physical Review Letters, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and New Journal of Physics."

Anton Zeilinger elected to lead as new President of the Austrian National Academy of Sciences
Kurier.at Anton Zeilinger has been elected to lead as the new President for the Austrian National Academy of Sciences. He will begin serving in the position on July 1st of this year. 

Anton Zeilinger’s achievements have been most succinctly described in his citation for the Isaac Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics (UK), 

“for his pioneering conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, which have become the cornerstone for the rapidly-evolving field of quantum information. Anton is a pioneer in the field of quantum information and the foundations of quantum mechanics. He and his colleagues have demonstrated many world's-first achievements in the field, including quantum teleportation, entanglement swapping, dense coding, entanglement-based quantum cryptography, one-way quantum computation, multipartite quantum entanglement, and blind quantum computation. In addition, he has made many important contributions to the conceptual and experimental foundations of quantum mechanics, particularly in the areas of quantum entanglement and macroscopic quantum mechanics.” 

I lived and worked with Anton's group for two months on two consecutive Austrian National Research Fellowships for my research proposals to "Quantum Mechanics in Higher Dimensional Hilbert Spaces," and "What is Real in the Quantum World?" at the Austrian International Akademie, Traunkirchen, with Anton Zeilinger, Marcus Aspelmeyer, Caslav Brukner, Rupert Ursin, William Wootters, Christopher Fuchs, Daniel Greenberger and Michael Horne. 

Photos of the picturesque setting, and of the idyllic, crystalline lake in Traunkirchen, are available online here on Flickr.com.

Christopher Altman (front, center), Traunkirchen, Austria

Anton Zeilinger Selected to Serve as New Academy President

For some, he is the Austrian superstar of science. For others, because of his frequent public presence, he can be seen as a self-promoter. This much is not in dispute: The experimental physicist Anton Zeilinger (67) is one of those rare domestic scientists whose work has drawn the attention of the elite of the international scientific community. He sees science as few others do, through vivid and intricate experimental work—yet he taps into understandable language and easily reaches a lay audience. Now he will move to the top of the venerable Academy of Sciences (AAS) to convey his ideas as its chief.

"Mr. Beam," the "Quantum Pope," the "Pop Star of Science," "the Warlock from Vienna," as Zeilinger is sometimes called, with his graying beard and curly locks as a perfection of the stereotype of a scientist, enjoys widespread popularity despite sometimes facing criticisms. "The main reason he can convey such youthful enthusiasm is because he is an enthusiast himself."

Publicity never seems a motive for Zeilinger's work, recipient of the Club of Education and Science Journalists Award in 1996 for "Scientist of the Year". His motive is his enthusiasm for his subject. And so, as the award-winning physicist taught quantum physics to the Dalai Lama, discussed the meaning of life with Nobel laureates, and has always been set for even higher (Nobel Prize) ordinations. All this has been accomplished in a relatively short time—just looking back 15 years, when the physicist in 1997, with his teleportation experiments, made the breakthrough in the headlines through "beamed" quantum teleportation.

Research Timeline

Anton Zeilinger was born in May 20, 1945 in Ried, Upper Austria. He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Vienna, yet with "not a single hour attended to a lecture on quantum physics." He had to acquire his knowledge from books, as he writes in his book "Einstein's Veil" (2003). His PhD was awarded at the Atomic Institute of Helmut Rauch, with the "father of quantum optics in Austria," where he worked after graduation (1971) as an assistant. This period also saw his first research visits abroad, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late Nobel laureate Clifford G. Shull's lab (1994).

Anton made several other trips abroad before he returned to his homeland in 1990 as professor of the University of Innsbruck. In 1998 he moved to Vienna University, and since then there, to the Institute for Experimental Physics. In 2003 he also founded, together with the University of Innsbruck physicists groups led by Rainer Blatt, Rudolf Grimm and Hans Briegel, the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), of which he also serves as the scientific director. Zeilinger also leads as physics Dean for the University of Vienna.

Zeilinger appears as a gifted experimenter, succeeding in sophisticated attempts to uncover altogether new relationships in Nature, and to confirm or disprove current theories, where he also repeatedly ventures back to the basics and the foundational principles of quantum physics. He works, and leads, in one of the most exciting and fastest growing areas of physics today: quantum technology. 

Pentagon Field Operations for Disaster Relief and Humanitarian Aid

Synergy Strike Force operates under DoD directive 3000.05 to support humanitarian relief and stabilization efforts in post-conflict environments such as those in Afghanistan today. The group is comprised of specialists with various technical skills who carry access to a wide range of social networks, with operators functioning alongside and in the same capacity as special forces operatives.

These specialists live and work “outside the fence” on long-term deployments to the region, integrating with the local population, assimilating with them in culture, appearance, and in their native language. However—as an independent, autonomous unit under assignment from the Pentagon, the OSD, and under interagency intelligence community programs—personnel assigned to the task force can also come from outside the formal boundaries of the US Government.

Project initiatives include the provision of free and resilient power, water, communications and Internet access; solar-powered, amorphous, ad-hoc distributed intelligent cellular and radio communications systems, medical supplies, education, open-source mapping and hyperspectral and multispectral satellite resources to protect endangered civilians worldwide. One example of program success: the initiative provided more than two million Internet-enabled cell phones to Afghan youths, enabling them to take part in the global dialogue.

The project puts boots on the ground to save lives every day in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, in other Mideast and South Asian countries, extending operations to South America, with trained DIA, USAF and OGA officers who assimilate seamlessly with the local population in the field and in their native environment. The program is coordinated by former Principal Assistant Secretary of Defense Lin Wells II, PhD, who served as Chief Information Officer for the Department of Defense.

Over coming decades, widespread armed conflict is anticipated to continue to diminish. However, natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis are anticipated to rise in frequency as a result of the impact of widespread environmental instability, giving rise to resource shortages in primary affected populations worldwide.

Linton Wells II, as former DEPSECDEF and DoD CIO, serves as US Force Transformation Chair, leading a wing of the Pentagon to take America’s military forward to meet this transition—to transform the United States armed forces from an efficient war-fighting machine into a unified force for disaster relief and humanitarian aid response teams in critical hot spots and third-world countries around the world.

The group further provides operations support at National Defense University (NDU), the Pentagon, and in the heart of the desert in Black Rock City, Nevada—where our camp provided the high-speed internet communications backbone for the core of the city via microwave internet field relays to the most proximate nearby town of Gerlach.

In previous years, critical injuries, such as broken bones, required the immediate and costly response of a helicopter medivac team to airlift the victims to the nearest main hospital in Reno, Nevada. The communications access provided by our team allows medical personnel and experienced X-ray technicians stationed on-site to locally diagnose these injuries, reducing the incident costs arising from inevitable accidental casualties.

The collective of Black Rock City itself serves as a large-scale technology, behavioral psychology and social network testbed, providing the world’s only experimental incubator for the study of a post-scarcity economy.

Rapid advances in nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, neuroscience and cognitive technology—enabled by the rapid technological progress of Moore’s Law doubling in computer processing power, speed and complexity—will converge to confer radical changes to our society over coming decades.

The subject of the post-scarcity economy is of intense scrutiny to government leadership and to intelligence organizations around the world—who would seek to justify their continued existence in perpetuity through the transitions enabled by this technological convergence—as concurrent advances such as those in nanotechnology and three-dimensional printing will make currency and corporations wholly obsolete.

Why go to the store to buy a computer, electronics or pharmaceutical drugs, when the open-source plans to manufacture and print them are widely available on the Internet? Witness the contemporary impact to the music and movie industries.

Major industry associations, such as the RIAA and MPAA, are embroiled in a losing power struggle to counter an existential threat to their foundations and their very existence—that threat of rampant music and Hollywood film piracy—which is enabled by widespread internet use and the widespread advent of file sharing technologies.

The post-scarcity economy was a principal thesis in my 2002 Chair Report from the UNISCA First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, “Converging Technologies: The Future of the Global Information Society,” distributed to principal government leaders around the world at UNISCA, the United Nations and the Executive Office of the President—then selected as recipient of the Information Security Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Policy from RSA in 2004.

After side-by-side field assignments in Black Rock City, under operational mandate “Beta at Burning Man, not in Baghdad,” program demonstrations were conducted at the Pentagon and at National Defense University in conjunction with Operation STAR TIDES in Washington, DC.

Tunable photon-ion entanglement enables quantum networks Nature | Innsbruck In Nature 485 and concurrent KurzweilAI press coverage, Rainer Blatt, Tracy Northup, and Andreas Stute have constructed an interface for quantum networks that is both efficient and freely tunable—the first interface between a single ion and a single photon. "Whenever we have to transfer quantum information from processing sites to communication channels, and vice versa, we’re going to need an interface between light and matter," explains Northup. "This technique has two significant advantages over previous approaches that have entangled atoms with light: the efficiency with which we produce entangled photons is quite high and in principle could be increased to over 99 percent. But above all, this setup allows us to generate any possible entangled state.”

Inaugural NASA Quantum Future Technologies Conference NASA Ames Research Center

NASA scientists joined the best quantum technology experts from academia, government and industry to identify new and exciting opportunities in space exploration, aeronautics, earth and space science where quantum technologies can have the greatest impact.

Conference topics included next-generation quantum experiments for measurements of time and distance, navigation, field sensing, and gravity wave detection; scalable quantum computing architectures and algorithms; quantum key distribution for practical secure transmission over long distances, including fiber channels, earth-satellite links, and space-based communications networks.

Collaborations forged from this conference led to our invited submission to NIAC, OCT and DARPA under QUINESS mandate to create the world's first global quantum teleportation network: Astronaut Development and Deployment of a Secure Space Communications Network, with colleagues Rupert Ursin, Colin Williams, Paolo Villoresi, and Vikram Sharma.

See also: World’s-first demonstration of Earth-to-space quantum teleportation

Conference Website
Live Videoconference Stream


Update February 3, 2012 | Videos and presentations are now online at the conference website.

With special thanks to Pete Worden and Gabe Durkin.