University of Ottawa

Purpose

Secure communication is essential for stability of Canada’s finance and health sectors, as well as Canada’s defense and security organizations. Existing secure communication protocols are vulnerable to the advances in quantum computing. Moreover, transmitting carefully crafted quantum states of photons offers a suite of solutions for secure communication that are immune to adversaries with the ability to perform quantum computation. Secure key distribution between two or more parties in a network is one of the most studied subjects in classical and quantum communications for sharing secure messages. Foundational progress in quantum information processing is necessary to eliminate technical challenges associated with quantum network security. This project involves the acquisition of equipment to build a multi-channel, free space quantum security platform to complete research on quantum communications in real-world conditions and will establish research equipment which will allow researchers to explore fundamental features of high-dimensional quantum information processing in laboratory scale.