OSC Colloquium: Saikat Guha, "The Quantum Internet"

Title: "The Quantum Internet"

Abstract: 

In this talk, I will give an overview and glimpses of research at and surrounding the NSF-ERC Center for Quantum Networks (CQN). The objective of CQN is to design and build the foundational technologies to realize fault-tolerant long-distance quantum networking supported by repeaters and satellite connections, guided by an applications roadmap and deliberate research on long-term societal impacts. CQN is a highly interdisciplinary center that brings together cross-cutting research in material science, atomic physics, non-linear quantum optics, photonic device engineering, information theory, quantum error correction theory, computer networks, law, economics, and social-behavioral sciences. I will discuss our work architecting the quantum internet, the associated protocol stack, our work on quantum repeaters, CQN's testbed, along with brief mentions of the key application drivers of (local and distributed) entanglement - in sensing, communications, and computing. 

Bio:

Dr. Saikat Guha, Director, NSF-ERC Center for Quantum Networks Nasser Peyghambarian Endowed Chair in Optical Sciences Professor of Optical Sciences, Electrical Engineering, and Applied Mathematics University of Arizona 

Saikat Guha is the Peyghambarian Endowed Chair Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, James C. Wyant College of Optical Sciences, and the Director of the NSF-ERC Center for Quantum Networks (CQN). Saikat received his Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2002, and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 and 2008, respectively. From 2008 to 2017, he worked for Raytheon BBN Technologies, where in his most recent role as Lead Scientist, he led various sponsored projects in topics surrounding quantum enhanced photonic information processing. He was one of the founding members of the Quantum Information Processing group at BBN, formed in 2009. He joined the University of Arizona’s faculty in 2017.

 Saikat’s core expertise lies at the intersection of quantum optics and information theory---in exploring the fundamental quantum limits of how efficiently one can encode, process and extract information encoded in light, and in designing systems that could attain those limits. He research interests surround the design of classical and quantum optical communications, quantum-enhanced photonic sensing and imaging, and photonic quantum computing. 

Saikat is a Senior Member of the IEEE and received the Raytheon 2011 Excellence in Engineering and Technology Award, Raytheon’s highest technical honor, for work led by his DARPA Information in a Photon program team. He was a co-recipient of an honorable mention in NSA’s 2016 Cybersecurity Best Paper Award, the Anita Jones Entrepreneurial Award from Raytheon BBN Technologies, a NASA Tech Brief Award, and the Raymie Stata Award for Teaching Signals and Systems, from the Department of EECS at MIT. Saikat was a member of India’s first team to the International Physics Olympiad at Reykjavik in 1998, where he received the European Physical Society (EPS) Award for the experimental component.