Entanglement and quantum correlations are the fundamental tools for building protocols of Quantum Information Processing and Communication (QIPC).These fields passed in the last years the proof-of-concept stage, asking now for real-world implementations. In this context, light plays a fundamental role as the natural carrier of information over large distances and between logic elements within a processor.
However, the standard approach of quantum optics, that deals with single-or two-mode systems, turns out to be inadequate to analyse and tackle the problems posed by practical implementations of QIPC: not only since it does not allow for a realistic modelling but, even more, because it creates a bottleneck in the information capacity of the communication, manipulation and storage of quantum information.
HIDEAS aims at a breakthrough in the information capacity of quantum communication, by exploiting the intrinsic multivariate and multi-modal character of the radiation field, which involves spatial, temporal and polarization degrees of freedom. The long term vision underlying our project is that of a broadband quantum communication, where all the physical properties of the photons are utilized to store information. This proposal intends to do crucial steps towards the realization of this ambitious vision. The general objectives are to study, on the one hand, how to produce in a controlled way quantum entanglement of light in high dimensional and multimodal spaces; on the other hand, we need to create multimode quantum interfaces between light and matter so that quantum states of light can be stored and processed in long-lived matter degrees of freedom.
From a different perspective, our research will contribute fundamentally to the field of metrology, a domain where multimode aspects have been introduced with great success ("frequency combs"), and quantum noise tailoring demonstrated a powerful tool to increase the sensitivity of high-precision measurements ("quantum metrology").
