QUROPE Quantum Information Processing and Communication in Europe

A call for proposals for the next QUIE2T sponsored QIPC conference has been published.

Single quantum emitters such as atoms are well known as non-classical light sources with reduced noise in the intensity, capable of producing photons one by one at given times. However, the light field emitted by a single atom can exhibit much richer dynamics. A prominent example is the predicted ability of a single atom to produce quadrature-squeezed light, which has fluctuations of amplitude or phase that are below the shot-noise level. However, such squeezing is much more difficult to observe than the emission of single photons.

QuintessenceLabs Pty Ltd is a deep technology company incorporated in 2006 to commercialise breakthrough information security systems premised on the practical application of advanced quantum physics. The company comprises world-class scientific talent and has established an international network of commercialisation and technical talent. QuintessenceLabs aims to be the global leading supplier of OEM quantum communications technology to networking, communications and defense companies.

 CriptoCam s.r.l. has been founded in 2008 by a group of researchers from physics, engineering and computer science to promote QKD and to provide consultancy, services and products for the Companies and/or Institutions interested in this field.

SELEX Sistemi Integrati, a Finmeccanica company, designs and develops Large Systems for Homeland Protection, systems and radar for air defence, battlefield management, naval warfare, air traffic control, coastal and maritime surveillance.The Company with about 4,200 employees has fifty years of experience in system integration and a customer base in no less than 150 countries. Chief scientist, Fabio Bovino, of the Optics group is leading the efforts in quantum cryptography.

Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive with numerous applications. Quantum information allows for bit commitment schemes in the information theoretic setting where no dishonest party can perfectly cheat. The previously best-known quantum protocol by Ambainis achieved a cheating probability of at most 3/4, while Kitaev showed that no quantum protocol can have cheating probability less than 1/sqrt{2}. Closing this gap has since been an important and open question. In this paper, the authors provide the optimal bound for quantum bit commitment.

I'd like to invite you to the International Science Day (ISD), an event to celebrate Science taking place on June 5th in Turku (Finland), the 2011 European Capital of Culture.

Using background-free detection of spin-state-dependent resonance fluorescence from a single-electron charged quantum dot with an efficiency of 0.1%, we realize a classical single spin-photon interface where the detection of a scattered photon with 300 ps time resolution projects the quantum dot spin to a definite spin eigenstate with fidelity exceeding 99%. The bunching of resonantly scattered photons reveals information about electron spin dynamics.

We provide a class of bound entangled states that have a positive distillable secure key rate. The smallest state of this kind is 44. Our class is a generalization of the class presented in Horodecki et al (2008 IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 54 2621–5).

The generation of entangled photon pairs is usually a complex process involving optically driven schemes and nonlinear optics. The recent demonstration of an electrically powered light-emitting diode that is capable of this task looks set to greatly simplify experiments in the field of quantum information processing.