QUROPE Quantum Information Processing and Communication in Europe

QIPC is a new conceptual framework, a new way of looking at things with deep reaching consequences from network security to understanding the structure of the physical reality. It covers a broad spectrum of activities, from researching the foundations of quantum mechanics between the microscopic and the macroscopic level, to the development of patented industrial applications like quantum key distribution devices. The three domains of QIPC, quantum computation, communication and theory, are all closely connected, and within these domains there are a variety of different approaches that are all striving towards the same goal - integrated quantum systems. This integration will provide the next great challenge and inspiration for QIPC. In recent years tremendous progress has been made in all three fields, improved distances and fidelities in quantum cryptography and teleportation, coherent control of atomic systems for processing and theory is making daily advances in developing a basis for the theory of quantum computer science. Characteristic of the work within QIPC is that proof-of-principle advances in each of the sub-domains are used when pursuing the work in the other sub-domains and this is a key issue for developing QIPC as an integrated science and the basis of future and emerging technology. The experimental demands on the next phase of QIPC research will have a larger focus on integration of components and their reliability as the field moves from research oriented problems to applied and even commercial quantum technologies. Still an even closer interplay between theory and experiment will be needed in order to achieve complete realistic schemes for coherent manipulation and high-precision performance. These efforts will eventually lead to a pool of reliable technologies for the different components of a quantum architecture, much like it happens now for classical computers where magnetic, optical and electric bits are used for storage, transmission and processing of information, respectively. Clearly, it is too early to pick the winner implementation for the practical realization of a working quantum device: it is even possible that the best technology is still to be developed. The already ongoing integration among different research communities (for instance those working on solid-state and on atom/quantum optical systems) is a solid basis for further pushing these effort to integrating actual devices. An avenue that theory needs to embrace in order for efficient implementations to be developed is a deeper understanding of entanglement, which is a quantum feature that permeates the whole QIPC; its complexity just started being appreciated and much is left to investigate both in terms of formal theoretical description and of its applications. One also needs to fully explore the potentials of the available physical systems in order to invent new communication protocols, to investigate algorithmic consequences of physical assumptions, and to develop new computational algorithms, both implementable with a small-scale quantum computer and exploiting the immense power entailed in quantum parallelism.