India's Quantum computing, QKD capabilities and QUEST

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Cabinet clears Rs 6,000-crore National Quantum Mission: All you need to know
India is going to be at par with six global countries researching quantum technology.

Jitendra Singh

The Union Cabinet has approved the National Quantum Mission (NQM) at a cost of Rs 6,003.65 crore.
The mission indicates that India’s foray into the research and development of quantum technology will have defined milestones that are expected to be achieved over the course of next eight years - from 2023-24 to 2030-31.

What is quantum technology?

Quantum technology is a field of physics and engineering that studies and applies the principles of quantum mechanics to the development of new technologies. Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that describes the behaviour of matter and energy at a microscopic scale, where the classical laws of physics do not apply.

The principle is used in semiconductors, lasers, Blu-ray, transistors, mobile phones, USB drives, MRI, electron microscopes, and even the basic light switch.

While the classical computer is transistor-based, quantum computers are going to work on atoms. Quantum computers use quantum bits (qubits), instead of classical bits to perform calculations. The advantage of quantum computing is that it can solve problems much faster with more authenticity.

What is the National Quantum Mission?

India’s quantum mission has been in the works since 2018, when the Department of Science and Technology put out a call for proposals on projects related to the field of quantum computing. QuEST (Quantum-Enabled Science and Technology) falls under the department’s Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems (ICPS) division.

In January 2019, the first mission meeting of the QuEST programme was held at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT)-Hyderabad. The event was attended by nearly 50 delegates, most of them academics working in the area of quantum physics.

Top science representatives of the government’s different research branches, including principal scientific adviser (PSA) to the government K VijayRaghavan, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman K Sivan, and NITI Aayog member and former defence secretary Vijay Kumar Saraswat, were also present.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her 2020 Budget speech had said that India was set to invest Rs 8,000 crore over the next five years in the National Mission on Quantum Technology or the QuEST programme.

What is the significance of the mission?

According to Singh, the National Quantum Mission can take the technology development ecosystem in the country to a globally competitive level.

The mission aims to make India a leading nation in the quantum technology sector and promote economic growth. "The decision is going to give India a quantum jump in the field," Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh said.

India is going to be at par with six global countries researching quantum technology. Most countries are in the research and development phase. The US, China, France, Austria, and Finland are in the research and development stage and are yet to venture into the application stage of the technology, and India will be the latest entrant into the club.

What does the mission aim to do?

The new mission targets developing intermediate scale quantum computers with 50-1,000 physical qubits in eight years across various platforms like superconducting and photonic technology. In classical computing, the smallest and most basic unit of information that can be processed and stored is called a 'bit'. In quantum computing, the basic unit of information is called a 'qubit'.

"We will try to achieve 20 to 50 qubits in the first three years, 50-100 in the first five years. By the end of this mission, our target is to develop a1,000-qubit computer," science minister Singh said.

Though many companies have developed and are working on quantum computers, they are in early stages of development, as qubits are extremely delicate and prone to errors, and increasing the number of qubits, while maintaining their stability is a major challenge in the development of quantum computers.

How will the mission benefit India?

The mission will help develop magnetometers with high sensitivity in atomic systems and atomic clocks for precision timing, communications and navigation. It will also support the design and synthesis of quantum materials such as superconductors, novel semiconductor structures and topological materials for the fabrication of quantum devices. Single photon sources or detectors and entangled photon sources will also be developed for quantum communications, sensing and metrological applications.

The mission would greatly benefit communication, health, financial and energy sectors as well as drug design, and space applications. It will provide a huge boost to national priorities like Digital India, Make in India, Skill India and Stand-up India, Start-up India, Self-reliant India and Sustainabl

 

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ISRO aims to launch QKD satellite, Ahmedabad to play key role

Indian Space Research Organisation. (Photo: IANS)

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) aims to launch its own Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) satellite, with Ahmedabad poised to play a pivotal role in the development of the nation’s secure and unhackable quantum communication capabilities.

The announcement came during the inaugural session of the Param Vikram 1000 High-Performance Cluster (HPC) computing facility at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL).

Under this initiative, a team of scientists from PRL, in collaboration with ISRO-Space Applications Centre (SAC) and several other institutions, will work over the next two years to propel the advancements in quantum communication technology.

Notably, ISRO-SAC achieved a significant milestone in March 2020 by demonstrating free-space quantum communication across a distance of 300 meters. Building on this achievement, PRL’s Thaltej campus embarked on a series of experiments to further explore the potential of this cutting-edge technology.

During the event, ISRO Chairman S Somanath highlighted the team’s expertise in short-range optical quantum communication specifically in Ahmedabad, where they successfully transmitted data over 300 meters.

The ultimate goal is to integrate this technology into ISRO’s satellites, enabling closed-loop communication with minimal signal attenuation through QKD. However, further enhancements are required to realize this vision.

Somanath reaffirmed ISRO’s commitment to continuous refinement of the technology and its integration into future satellite launches.

QKD relies on the principles of quantum physics rather than traditional mathematical calculations, making it an exceptionally secure method of communication. At the heart of quantum communications and cryptographic systems, QKD ensures robust data transfer with unrivalled security.

In QKD, classical bits representing “0” and “1” are transmitted over a network as data, such as emails, video calls, or banking transactions.

Simultaneously, the decryption keys are transmitted as quantum entangled states known as qubits. These qubits, encoded into a polarized photon beam generated by a single photon or light source, carry binary values.

Any attempt to intercept or eavesdrop on the transmission disrupts the quantum nature of the encrypted key, immediately alerting the parties involved. This characteristic makes QKD an exceedingly secure method of data transfer.

 

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Dr Nilesh desai said what happened with QUantess payload

 

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Researchers at IIT Delhi Achieve Trusted-node-free Secure Quantum Communication for 380 km in Standard Telecom Fiber

New Delhi: In a recent experimental breakthrough on secure quantum communication, researchers at IIT Delhi have achieved a trusted-node-free quantum key distribution (QKD) up to 380 km in standard telecom fiber with a very low quantum bit error rate (QBER).

This long secure length is the highest achieved so far, not only in India but first globally for the Differential Phase Shift (DPS) QKD protocol, keeping IIT Delhi at the forefront of research and development in quantum communication technologies. Such low QBER enables the DPS QKD scheme resistant to collective and individual attacks and implementable for various applications, such as securing financial transactions, medical records, and secret codes. It is also capable of securing network communication, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), and is ready to revolutionize the field of cyber security.

“This realization using state-of-the-art technology would not only help in reducing the need for trusted nodes for intercity or long-distance quantum key exchange, increasing the security of the cryptography scheme, but would also prove to be a crucial step towards the commercial production of long-distance secure practical QKD devices”, said Dr. Bhaskar Kanseri, lead researcher and Associate Professor at the Physics Department and Optics and Photonics Centre.

Prof. Kanseri added that in quantum communication, security is guaranteed by the laws of Quantum Physics and, in principle, it cannot be broken even using a quantum computer. This QKD demonstration shows methods to get rid of the intermediate trusted nodes, which are weak security loopholes and are vulnerable to several kinds of attacks. It paves the way for more secure long-distance communication useful for strategic areas such as defence and online banking, making digital transactions safer in the near future.

They conducted this study using the baseline error optimisation method at their Experimental Quantum Interferometry and Polarization (EQUIP) lab. According to Dr. Kanseri, the current DPS QKD demonstration for the first time optimizes most of the sources of errors, which are mainly due to the laser linewidth, modulation bandwidth, detector noise, and dispersion of fibers, resulting in the least QBER (less than 2.5%) achieved so far, which is an international record for such a large distance in fiber.

This study titled ‘Phase Encoded Quantum Key Distribution up to 380 km in Standard Telecom Grade Fiber Enabled By Baseline Error Optimization’ is recently published in the prestigious journal Nature Scientific Reports (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-42445-y). In this work, Prof. Bhaskar Kanseri was joined by research scholars Mr. Nishant Kumar Pathak, Mr. Sumit Chaudhary, and Ms. Sangeeta.



Photo: (In EQUIP lab) Sangeeta (left), Dr. Bhaskar Kanseri (middle) and Nishant K. Pathak (right)

It is noteworthy that the team led by Dr. Kanseri, along with DRDO, has previously demonstrated the first Indian intercity quantum communication between Vindhyanchal and Prayagraj in 2022, which was using more than 100 km commercial-grade underground dark optical fiber.

 

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This is research papers published by him

 

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