Quantum technologies in space

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, the European Commission supported by many European countries has announced large investments towards the commercialization of quantum technology (QT) to address and mitigate some of the biggest challenges facing today’s digital erae.g. secure communication and computing power. For more than two decades the QT community has been working on the development of QTs, which promise landmark breakthroughs leading to commercialization in various areas. The ambitious goals of the QT community and expectations of EU authorities cannot be met solely by individual initiatives of single countries, and therefore, require a combined European effort of large and unprecedented dimensions comparable only to the Galileo or Copernicus programs. Strong international competition calls for a coordinated European effort towards the development of QT in and for space, including research and development of technology in the areas of communication and sensing. Here, we aim at summarizing the state of the art in the development of quantum technologies which have an impact in the field of space applications. Our goal is to outline a complete framework for the design, development, implementation, and exploitation of quantum technology in space.

Space QUEST mission proposal: Experimentally testing decoherence due to gravity

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Models of quantum systems on curved space-times lack sufficient experimental verification. Some speculative theories suggest that quantum properties, such as entanglement, may exhibit entirely different behavior to purely classical systems. By measuring this effect or lack thereof, we can test the hypotheses behind several such models. For instance, as predicted by Ralph and coworkers [T C Ralph, G J Milburn, and T Downes, Phys. Rev. A, 79(2):22121, 2009, T C Ralph and J Pienaar, New Journal of Physics, 16(8):85008, 2014], a bipartite entangled system could decohere if each particle traversed through a different gravitational field gradient. We propose to study this effect in a ground to space uplink scenario. We extend the above theoretical predictions of Ralph and coworkers and discuss the scientific consequences of detecting/failing to detect the predicted gravitational decoherence. We present a detailed mission design of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space QUEST (Space - Quantum Entanglement Space Test) mission, and study the feasibility of the mission schema.

Rupert Ursin | LIP6 - Équipe QI

Quantum technologies in space

Space QUEST mission proposal: Experimentally testing decoherence due to gravity