Friday, August 25, 2017

High-dimensional quantum encryption

Science Codex reports:
High-dimensional quantum encryption performed in real-world city conditions for first time


Quantum encryption uses photons to encode information in the form of quantum bits. In its simplest form, known as 2D encryption, each photon encodes one bit: either a one or a zero. Scientists have shown that a single photon can encode even more information -- a concept known as high-dimensional quantum encryption -- but until now this has never been demonstrated with free-space optical communication in real-world conditions. With eight bits necessary to encode just one letter, for example, packing more information into each photon would significantly speed up data transmission.

"Our work is the first to send messages in a secure manner using high-dimensional quantum encryption in realistic city conditions, including turbulence," said research team lead, Ebrahim Karimi, University of Ottawa, Canada. "The secure, free-space communication scheme we demonstrated could potentially link Earth with satellites, securely connect places where it is too expensive to install fiber, or be used for encrypted communication with a moving object, such as an airplane."

This is useless. There is no shortage of photon, and we can currently send terabits of data thru networks optically.

They send 2 bits of data a few hundred feet. To be useful, they would have to send many many orders of magnitude more data, and they also have to hope that someone invents a quantum computer that can be turned into a router. Current routers costs $20 and send 100s of megabits per second. Even with a $50M quantum computer, you would be lucky to get a few kilobits per second.

I am posting this because of the buzzword escalation. It is not enuf to claim "quantum encryption". This claims "high-dimensional quantum encryption". Sounds impressive, right?


  1. At what point does an investor in one of the programs notice they have spent a tremendous amount of money and received only buzzwords in return? Doesn't sound very cost effective.

  2. They can't even figure out how to use the immune system to fight cancer but this is what we research? It's kids stuff next to actually hard problems like gene therapy immunology. The people that work on this crap aren't even that intelligent. You learn a few equations and quack out a few texts and they think you're a genius these days.