Single photon sources for fiber optical quantum key distribution

安全在日常通信系统中扮演着至关重要的角色，数十亿用户通过他们的设备访问互联网。网上银行、电子商务、电子保健和网上购物是少数几个对客户来说无条件安全至关重要的例子。然而，当前通信系统的安全性依赖于可能被窃听者和黑客破坏的数学和计算能力。目前的安全协议也容易受到量子计算等颠覆性技术的影响，因此确实需要一种替代方法。

Security plays a crucial role in everyday's communication systems with billions of users accessing the Internet from their devices. Online banking, e-commerce, e-health and online shopping are few examples in which unconditional security is of central importance to customers.The security of current communication systems, however, relies on mathematical and computational power that can be compromised by eavesdroppers and hackers. Current security protocols are also vulnerable to disruptive technologies such as quantum computing so there is a real need for an alternative approaches. Quantum Key Distributions (QKD) offers an ultimate solution that its unconditional security is based on the laws of quantum physics rather than mathematical power. There is a rapidly-growing technology to exploit quantum states of light, photons, in an existing optical fiber backbone to provide the security at the physical layers. Few successful companies provide optical fiber QKD solutions, however they are still suffering from imperfections in generation, detection and transmission of photons efficiently to take full advantage of quantum properties of light. Single photon sources and detectors are playing central role in all of the QKD systems and schemes and they are the most vulnerable components in the practical QKD systems. In this proposal, Majedi's group at the University of Waterloo teams up with RANOVUS to identify various single photon sources for QKD systems in terms of their performances, cost, and commercialization potentials. Majedi's group has a well-known expertise in single photon detectors and sources with a well-established experimental infrastructure at Waterloo fully capable of conducting such a research task. RANOVUS is a leading Canadian company with a portfolio in offering quantum dot multi-wavelength laser combined with advanced digital and photonics integrated circuit technologies for secure and high-speed communication networks.