CAREER: Using Entanglement to Enhance Communication and Sensing in the Presence of Noise

The proposed CAREER project will utilize quantum effects to advance the sensing and communication technology, and at the same time deepen the understanding of quantum physics. While modern technology has provided people precise sensing tools and convenient communication devices, for many demanding tasks, the performance is fundamentally limited by classical physics and is far from satisfying.

Quantum effects are required to further boost performance. However, quantum effects are usually fragile to the environmental noise ambient in practical scenarios, which makes enhancing performance by quantum technology challenging. The proposed project will solve the noise issue and develop robust quantum protocols for practical sensing and communication applications, including quantum radar, quantum communication networks and quantum sensor networks.

The protocols will feature devices and systems that are currently off-the-shelf or realizable in the near-term. These research activities will integrate with an education plan to prepare the next generation of diverse Quantum Information Science (QIS) engineers who will be adaptive and creative innovators in a globally connected, innovation-driven world with great consideration of the societal impacts of their work.

For the education plan, the PI will: (1) organize a workshop each summer oriented to industry that fosters a collaborative environment between academia and industry on QIS; (2) develop a new QIS course to augment the standard curriculum with education materials derived from this quantum sensing and communication CAREER project; and (3) develop an undergraduate summer research program to engage students from diverse backgrounds into the CAREER research. The proposed quantum sensing and communication system designs will impact the NSF’s Big 10 Ideas and cut across multiple research disciplines essential to the Nation’s competitiveness and prosperity, including quantum information, machine learning, and photonics.

The expected project outcomes will apply to sensing and communication tasks that include deep-space communication, radar detection, inertia force sensing, and radio-frequency signal sensing. Such outcomes will lead to innovations in the aerospace, chemical, environmental protection, finance, healthcare, and information technology industries that impact society and the US economy.

By working with industrial partners like General Dynamics, Arm Ltd., and Fidelity Investments, the PI and his group will help to translate fundamental quantum research into industry technologies. For the education plan, the proposed: (1) workforce development workshops will help to prepare US industry employees and university students for the future quantum edge; and (2) hands-on research experience with the PI’s group will enable undergraduates to gain problem-solving skills and a more in-depth knowledge of QIS to inspire them to follow QIS career pathways. Graduate students will obtain direct experience of mentoring under the PI’s supervision.

The proposed CAREER project will determine the ultimate quantum limits of sensing and communication tasks and develop entanglement-assisted (EA) protocols to advance real-world sensing and communication scenarios with near-term technology. The PI will propose, analyze, and verify protocol designs that can benefit from entanglement in the presence of noise for an EA quantum pulse compression radar, an EA communication network, and an EA sensor-network.

The project team will combine numerical and analytical calculations in the theory and modeling of quantum systems and adopt advanced machine-learning tools for variational circuit optimization. The theory framework for analyzing different sensing and communication systems will be a solid foundation to explore EA quantum information processing in the presence of noise, and will include sensing and communication modeling, source and measurement optimization, and techniques to bound the capacity region.

The proposed project will advance knowledge from both fundamental and practical angles. On a fundamental level, the research will deepen the understanding of the operational meaning of bipartite and multipartite entanglement and provide paradigms for multiple parameter estimation and distributed parameter estimation: estimating a global property of various local parameters.

On the application and engineering levels, the designed protocols will guide the near-term development of quantum devices for acquiring, storing, and processing information to meet the goal of realizing entanglement benefits in practice.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.