QKD Satellite Ground-Station PhD Proposal

2020年，在为后量子安全做好准备的需求日益增长的推动下，英国提出了一项为英国长途量子密钥分配网络建立卫星星座的建议，作为一项国家安全能力。为此，一组卫星源将下行到一系列近红外光学地面站。该小组的目标是开发使这成为可能的技术，我的位置将主要在地面站工作。继之前的学生埃利奥特·黑斯廷斯的工作之后，地面站需要能够非常精确地与移动的卫星对齐，并测量非常有损耗的量子信号。地面站目前的状态是我们有一个望远镜和一个测量系统，这些需要与卫星源一起工作。为了这个博士学位，我需要把望远镜变成QKD协议中的一个完整的“鲍勃”，能够指向移动的卫星；将量子测量光学对准至少575公里外的光源；补偿大气畸变和卫星运动对量子信号的影响，生成共享密钥。首先要在几百米外的地面上复制一颗“爱丽丝”卫星模块，完成完整的协议。然后发射一颗立方体卫星，从地球到地面做同样的事情。我在地面站的工作也使其他几个工程挑战得以克服，包括增加地面站的可移植性，使接收模块望远镜不可知，使地面站能够传输，并进一步使其能够从远离地面站的实验室中的原子传输纠缠到卫星。我们还可以实现其他一些“第一次”，比如在任何移动的车辆上安装一个爱丽丝模块，并向现在移动的望远镜传输数据，包括无人机、船只、气球或直升机，显然其中一些比其他的更容易实现。

In 2020 a proposal for a satellite constellation for a UK long distance QKD network was proposed [1] as a national security capability, spurred by the growing need to be ready for post-quantum security. To do this, a fleet of satellite sources will downlink to a series of NIR optical ground-stations. The group's goal is to develop the technologies to make this possible, and my place will be mainly working on the ground station. Following on from the previous student Elliot Hasting's work, the ground station needs to be able to align with great accuracy to a moving satellite and measure the very lossy quantum signal. The current state of the ground station is that we have a telescope and a measurement system, these need to work with a satellite source. For this PhD I need to make the telescope into a full "Bob" in the QKD protocol, able to point at a moving satellite; align the quantum measurement optics with a source a minimum of 575km away; compensate for the atmospheric distortion and motion of the satellite on the quantum signal and generate a shared key. This will start with doing this full protocol with a copy of the satellite "Alice" module on the ground over a distance of a few hundreds of meters. And then after a CubeSat is launched to do the same from Earth to Ground. My work on the ground-station also enables several other engineering challenges to be overcome, including increasing the ground station portability, making the receive module telescope agnostic, making the ground station capable of transmission and further making it capable of transmitting an entanglement from an atom in a lab far from the ground station to a satellite. We could also achieve a few other "firsts" like installing an Alice module on any moving vehicle and transmitting to the now mobile telescope, including drones, ships, balloons, or helicopters, obviously some of these are more accessible than others.