Cisco is developing a quantum entanglement chip that could ultimately become part of the gear that will populate future quantum data centers. The research prototype, developed in cooperation with University of California, Santa Barbara, generates pairs of entangled photons that instantly transmit quantum state between each other, regardless of the distance between them, through what’s known as quantum teleportation, or what Albert Einstein described as “spooky action at a distance,” according to Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of Outshift by Cisco.
The chip operates at room temperature, uses minimal power, and functions using existing telecom frequencies, Panday said.
“This is a research prototype — so based on the process that we have in research, we could only extract 1 million usable pairs per second today. But once we start putting it through Cisco’s process of building silicon, you will be able to extract a lot more and get closer to that 200 million a second,” Pandey said. “The second important feature is that it uses less than a million watts of power. That’s really small. That’s actually lighting up a pixel, or a few pixels, on your phone.”
The chip is designed to work with existing infrastructure. It can send photons over existing fiber, and it operates at standard telecom frequencies, so there’s no need to rip and replace anything to support it, Pandey said. “Because of these properties, what you can do is you can deploy it in alongside existing classical computer infrastructure.”
The chip enables quantum networking through teleportation, offering practical use cases like decision signaling, clock synchronization, eavesdrop proof security, and secure position verification, Panday said.
Decision signaling is important because it enables the coordination and synchronization of quantum operations across a quantum network, allowing for the implementation of complex quantum communication and distributed quantum computing protocols, Pandey said.
Clock synchronization allows for coordinated time-dependent communications between end points that might be cloud databases or in large global databases that could be sitting across the country or across the world, he said.
“We saw recently when we were visiting Lawrence Berkeley Labs where they have all of these data sources such as radio telescopes, optical telescopes, satellites, the James Webb platform. All of these end points are taking snapshots of a piece of space, and they need to synchronize those snapshots to the picosecond level, because you want to detect things like meteorites, something that is moving faster than the rotational speed of planet Earth. So the only way you can detect that quickly is if you synchronize these snapshots at the picosecond level,” Pandey said.
For security use cases, the chip can ensure that if an eavesdropper tries to intercept the quantum signals carrying the key, they will likely disturb the state of the qubits, and this disturbance can be detected by the legitimate communicating parties and the link will be dropped, protecting the sender’s data. This feature is typically implemented in a Quantum Key Distribution system. Location information can serve as a critical credential for systems to authenticate control access, Pandey said.
The prototype quantum entanglement chip is just part of the research Cisco is doing to accelerate practical quantum computing and the development of future quantum data centers.
The quantum data center that Cisco envisions would have the capability to execute numerous quantum circuits, feature dynamic network interconnection, and utilize various entanglement generation protocols. The idea is to build a network connecting a large number of smaller processors in a controlled environment, the data center warehouse, and provide them as a service to a larger user base, according to Cisco.
The challenges for quantum data center network fabric are fundamentally different from classical ones, according to Ramana Kompella, head of Cisco research and distinguished engineer, and Reza Nejabati, head of quantum research and quantum labs at Cisco.
“Quantum data centers must preserve fragile quantum states, distribute entanglement resources, facilitate teleportation between processors and synchronize operations with sub-nanosecond precision. These capabilities are not in commercial off-the-shelf networking components,” Kompella and Nejabati wrote in a blog post. The quantum data center architecture Outshift by Cisco has developed consists of three layers, they stated:
“This architecture enables multiple smaller quantum processors to work together as a unified system, potentially accelerating practical quantum applications by years,” Kompella and Nejabati wrote.
Cisco Quantum Labs opens
Cisco also announced the official opening of Cisco Quantum Labs, its dedicated quantum networking research lab in Santa Monica, Calif. Researchers can experiment with quantum networking solutions that bridge both theoretical concepts and practical implementation, Pandey said in a Cisco blog post.
“Beyond the entanglement chip, we’re advancing research protypes of other critical components including entanglement distribution protocols, a distributed quantum computing compiler, Quantum Network Development Kit (QNDK), and a Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) using quantum vacuum noise,” Pandey wrote. “More components of our quantum data center infrastructure roadmap will be announced soon as we complete our vision of the quantum networking stack.
Cisco outlines the architecture needed for distributed quantum computing systems in its recently published paper, Quantum Data Center Infrastructures.
Source:: Network World