Quantum Network Design
Quantum technologies promise exciting applications, well beyond what is possible with existing platforms. Quantum cryptography may revolutionize communication security, quantum sensors allow to measure quantities with unprecedent precision, and quantum computers promise to solve problems that remain unsolvable with current system. To make them broadly accessible, and to harness their full potential, one needs to connect quantum computers and devices. This results in a quantum internet, which poses a major challenge, not only on manufacturing, but also when designing, planning and organizing quantum networks.
Quantum networks connect quantum devices and building prototypes and changing them or the network topology is extremely costly. The vision of Quantum Network Design (QND) is to provide simulation software to design, analyze and optimize quantum networks before building them. Such simulations allow for an enhanced planning, feasibility studies and resource optimization.
When simulating such networks, one faces a significant challenge, because the same features that make coupled quantum devices so powerful makes them inherently difficult to simulate with conventional techniques. The approach of QND to overcome these difficulties is twofold: On the one hand, cutting edge simulation methods based on recent insights to describe quantum systems push classical simulations to their limits. Together with a cloud-based design, accurate simulations of medium sized networks with appropriate, though simplified error models, become feasible. On the other hand, QND offers simulation methods that use existing quantum computer prototypes, even though suffering from imperfections, to efficiently simulate quantum networks. The imperfections are a desired feature as they are harnessed to accurately simulate the performance of real-world quantum devices in a network. The utilized simulation method transforms noise inherently present in existing quantum computers to simulate the noise of network devices and channels connecting them. In this way, large-scale networks are simulated accurately, thereby overcoming the exponential growing simulation complexity limiting classical simulations of quantum networks. The simulator Q2Sim will become a central tool for network design which paves the way towards a quantum internet. Due to the design of Q2Sim it will also be possible to use it for educational purposes to assist in the education of quantum network engineers.
QND is a spin-off company of the University of Innsbruck, and its founders, Prof. W. Dür and PhD A. Pirker, look back to more than two decades of research experience in quantum networks. They are among the pioneers of quantum networks, and have been involved in the first proposals to enable long-range quantum communication using quantum repeaters. Now they are aiming to utilize this knowledge to make quantum networks a reality – and put Austria on the forefront of quantum technology development.
QND Founder Professor Wolfgang Dür
QND Founder Dr. Alexander Pirker, PhD
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