Efficient QUantum Light for TechnologY

Project Information

EQUALITY

Grant agreement ID: 817021

DOI

10.3030/817021

Project closed

EC signature date 27 April 2018

Start date 1 May 2018

End date 31 October 2018

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

QUANDELA
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EQUALITY (Efficient QUantum Light for TechnologY)

Reporting period: 2018-05-01 to 2018-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Since recent development in quantum technologies and more largely in algorithms will revolutionize the Information Technologies, current security of the digital infrastructures in Europe and around the world could be soon under threat due to the possible obsolescence of mathematically-based cryptographic techniques. Therefore, the integrity of critical infrastructures and services could be affected as well as the confidentiality of data.
The most promising solution to maintain end-to-end security in the long term is the implementation of a Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) infrastructure in parallel of the current infrastructure.
For years, many public institutions (like the European Telecommunications Standards Institute – ETSI) recommended that private enterprises and public organisations should begin to upgrade their infrastructure with QKD infrastructures. Furthermore, a call for projects about the deployment of a QKD testbed have been published by the European Commission.
Many commercial products are available on the market then but most of them are limited to a few Kb/s for the exchange of keys with a maximum distance shorter than 100km. Quandela’s innovating products allow the bit rate to reach about 100Mb/s over a distance longer than 300km.
The present projects aimed to study how new products commercialized by Quandela could be adapted to penetrate and amplify the deployment of a quantum infrastructure in order to ensure a end-to-end security of digital infrastructures.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During this project, we investigated the potential of a new generation of light emitters commercialized by Quandela. Quandela is one of the first company to propose a new generation of emitters based on semiconducting nanostructures. Compared to previous generations of quantum light sources, these emitters allow the emission of 100Mb/s which is a worldwide record rate and above all allow the generation of more pure quantum states of light (entangled particles) that allow the distribution of quantum keys over a longer distance.
In this work, we studied the entry barriers for this new innovative product to be adopted by the actors of communications and of digital security.

We contacted several actors that are active in the deployment of QKD networks, industrial as well as academics, in order to understand their technical expectations.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The main conclusion of our interviews is that the main advantage of Quandela devices allow to overcome the optical fibers that are present in the communication network and to increase the maximum distance between trusted nodes by a factor of around 5-6. As a consequence, the required density of trusted nodes in a continental fibered network would be divided by the square of this factor, about 30 then.
Consequently, Quandela sources will make the deployment a secured QKD network since this technology will allow to largely increase the distance between the nodes and will minimize the number of infrastructure adapatations that are necessary.

Photo of the light emitters commercialized by Quandela