Joseph F. Fitzsimons

Demonstration of Blind Quantum Computing

Quantum Blindness While quantum computers offer speed advantages over their classical counterparts, the technological challenges facing their eventual realization suggest that they will need to be located in specialized facilities. Thus, interaction would then need to be on a quantum client:quantum server basis. Barz et al. (p. 303; see the Perspective by Vedral) implemented a proof-of-principle protocol that illustrates complete security in such a setup—for both the client and the server. In this blind quantum computing protocol, the client maintains the security of their data and the specifics of the calculation they want to perform, and the server cannot access the data or calculation of the client. A protocol is implemented that can ensure secure client-server interactions on a quantum computer architecture. Quantum computers, besides offering substantial computational speedups, are also expected to preserve the privacy of a computation. We present an experimental demonstration of blind quantum computing in which the input, computation, and output all remain unknown to the computer. We exploit the conceptual framework of measurement-based quantum computation that enables a client to delegate a computation to a quantum server. Various blind delegated computations, including one- and two-qubit gates and the Deutsch and Grover quantum algorithms, are demonstrated. The client only needs to be able to prepare and transmit individual photonic qubits. Our demonstration is crucial for unconditionally secure quantum cloud computing and might become a key ingredient for real-life applications, especially when considering the challenges of making powerful quantum computers widely available.

Experimental verification of quantum computation

Can Alice verify the result of a quantum computation that she has delegated to Bob without using a quantum computer? Now she can. A protocol for testing a quantum computer using minimum quantum resources has been proposed and demonstrated.

Composable Security of Delegated Quantum Computation

Delegating difficult computations to remote large computation facilities, with appropriate security guarantees, is a possible solution for the ever/growing needs of personal computing power. For delegated computation protocols to be usable in a larger context – or simply to securely run two protocols in parallel – the security definitions need to be composable. Here, we define composable security for delegated quantum computation. We distinguish between protocols which provide only blindness – the computation is hidden from the server – and those that are also verifiable – the client can check that it has received the correct result. We show that the composable security definition capturing both these notions can be reduced to a combination of several distinct “trace/distance/type” criteria – which are, individually, non/composable security definitions.

Quantum walks with encrypted data

In the setting of networked computation, data security can be a significant concern. Here we consider the problem of allowing a server to remotely manipulate client supplied data, in such a way that both the information obtained by the client about the servers operation and the information obtained by the server about the clients data are significantly limited. We present a protocol for achieving such functionality in two closely related models of restricted quantum computation-the boson sampling and quantum walk models. Because of the limited technological requirements of the boson scattering model, small scale implementations of this technique are feasible with present-day technology.

Measurement-based and universal blind quantum computation

Measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) is a novel approach to quantum computation where the notion of measurement is the main driving force of computation. This is in contrast with the more traditional circuit model which is based on unitary operation. We review here the mathematical model underlying MBQC and the first quantum cryptographic protocol designed using the unique features of MBQC.

Rapid and Robust Spin State Amplification

Electron and nuclear spins have been employed in many of the early demonstrations of quantum technology. However, applications in real world quantum technology are limited by the difficulty of measuring single spins. Here we show that it is possible to rapidly and robustly amplify a spin state using a lattice of ancillary spins. The model we employ corresponds to an extremely simple experimental system: a homogenous Ising-coupled spin lattice in one, two, or three dimensions, driven by a continuous microwave field. We establish that the process can operate at finite temperature (imperfect initial polarization) and under the effects of various forms of decoherence.

Information capacity of a single photon

Quantum states of light are the obvious choice for communicating quantum information. To date, encoding information into the polarization states of single photons has been widely used as these states form a natural closed two-state qubit. However, photons are able to encode much more\char22{}in principle, infinite\char22{}information via the continuous spatiotemporal degrees of freedom. Here we consider the information capacity of an optical quantum channel, such as an optical fiber, where a spectrally encoded single photon is the means of communication. We use the Holevo bound to calculate an upper bound on the channel capacity, and relate this to the spectral encoding basis and the spectral properties of the channel. Further, we derive analytic bounds on the capacity of such channels, and, in the case of a symmetric two-state encoding, calculate the exact capacity of the corresponding channel.

Distributed quantum computation with arbitrarily poor photon detection

In a distributed quantum computer, scalability is accomplished by networking together many elementary nodes. Typically the network is optical and internode entanglement involves photon detection. In complex networks the entanglement fidelity may be degraded by the twin problems of photon loss and dark counts. Here we describe an entanglement protocol which can achieve high fidelity even when these issues are arbitrarily severe; indeed the method succeeds with finite probability even if the photon detectors are entirely removed from the network. An experimental demonstration should be possible with existing technologies.