In other news, researchers have made an impressive breakthrough in the field of quantum technology. Through extensive mathematics, they found an approach that sidesteps the limitations introduced by the no-cloning theorem in quantum computing and communications. This theorem essentially says that we cannot copy unknown quantum states, and thus has posed a key difficulty in the field. A recent research paper published in Physical Review Letters shows some very promising discoveries on that front. They showcase their solutions in quantum secure cloud services.
One of these is the no-cloning theorem, one of the central tenets of quantum mechanics. It claims you cannot clone an arbitrary unknown quantum state. This limitation increases the difficulty of creating scalable quantum computing and quantum secure communication systems. If we can afford to replicate data, we are not only increasing processing power but increasing security. To confuse things even more, measuring a qubit, the basic unit of quantum information, destroys its state.
The Discovery
So Achim Kempf, a physics professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, paired up with Koji Yamaguchi, an assistant professor at Kyushu University in Japan. Together, they pulled off Genius’ biggest coup. Their community-focused work was started while Yamaguchi was a post-doctoral researcher in Kempf’s lab. Together with other researchers in his lab, the duo discovered an extraordinary design that skips past common cloning rules.
Kempf explained the implications of their discovery: “What we found was that qubits can, in fact, be perfectly cloned under one condition. At the same time you clone them, you need to encrypt them too.” By employing an approach similar to a classical “one-time pad,” this new protocol produces pairs of noisy entangled qubits. Only the last qubit is still in the state of the initial qubit. That respect for the limits imposed by nature is everything.
The researchers further stressed that their approach is in accordance with the no-cloning theorem. Rather than producing a perfect duplicate, it produces an “encrypted” qubit. It also means that when one qubit becomes manipulated for calculations, you need the original quantum state to be preserved.
Overcoming Computational Challenges
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to overcome in quantum computing comes from the fact that you can’t read the data without destroying it. This limitation leads to high overheads when performing operations on data that cannot be directly queried. The result of the new quantum encryption scheme leads to a dramatically higher level of interaction. It does this without destroying the integrity of the original qubit in the process.
Through the use of noise subtraction methods, the state of one of the “encrypted” signal qubits can be revealed. Kempf and Yamaguchi were careful to formulate their experiments in a way that demonstrated robustness of their method even in the presence of hardware imperfections. This robustness is very important for real-world use.
Kempf expressed his satisfaction with the outcomes of their work: “The experiments turned out really beautiful and better than we could have hoped.” This idea really explains how promising their findings are and what they could mean for future applications of quantum technology.
Implications for Quantum Cloud Services
The implications of this discovery reach far beyond theoretical discussions. By scaling, securing, and uniting quantum encryption technologies, success would mean international access to highly secure quantum cloud services. With this type of technology a service provider like AWS can ensure that their customers’ quantum data is stored safely and redundantly. They can provide mutually redundant, secure computation on that data.
“You can imagine a quantum cloud service provider would be able to provide not only safe redundant storage of your quantum data, but safe redundant computation on your quantum data.” This technical capability would dramatically transform our ability to process and store quantum information. It will lay the groundwork for new breakthroughs in secure communication and quantum computing.