Quantum technology is expected to provide unconditionally safe data encryption required by the finance, healthcare, energy, telecommunications, defence and other essential industries and sectors.
Funded by Carnot, a French multidisciplinary network, the project will build on CEA-Leti’s silicon-photonics platform complemented with new quantum characterization equipment for designing, processing and testing quantum-photonic integrated components and circuits. The institute uses photons to build quantum bits, or qubits, which are the best physical means for quantum communications.
The three-year project will fabricate silicon-photonics circuits that generate single photons, manipulate those photons with linear optical components such as slow and rapid phase shifters and detect them with superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPD).
The project will build demonstrators for transmitting and receiving information in a quantum-based system to deliver quantum-technology’s promise for ultra-secure cryptography. For example, the demonstrators will realize an integrated qubit transmitter, as a circuit generating single photons and entangling them. An integrated qubit receiver will be built to detect the photons.
Beyond these demonstrators, the CEA-Leti team will also focus on integrating the qubit transmitter and the qubit receiver on one unique platform to address also quantum computing applications.
“Almost daily, we read about breaches of standard cryptography protocols, with major financial-loss and security-risk implications, and the threat to critical infrastructure, such as power-supply systems,” said Ségolène Olivier, R&D project leader at CEA-Leti and coordinator of this project. “With the future advent of quantum computers, the risk will drastically increase as current encryption algorithms will not be safe anymore. Quantum cryptography is the solution to this problem as it is not vulnerable to computing power.”
