Aug 22, 2024 09:52 AM IST
Urbasi Sinha, who heads the Quantum Information and Computing laboratory at the Raman Research Institute in Bengaluru, tries to use the laws of quantum mechanics to make communication more secure.
Urbasi Sinha, who heads the Quantum Information and Computing (QuIC) laboratory at the Raman Research Institute in Bengaluru, is the winner of this year’s Vigyan Yuva Shanti Swarup Award in the Physics category. She describes how she tries to use the laws of quantum mechanics to make communication more secure.
What I do
Quantum computing uses the principles of quantum mechanics to make speedy calculations. This has immense potential in areas as diverse as drug discovery and clean energy solutions, besides improving our understanding of these laws of nature.
These advancements, however, come with a rider. What if a hacker uses quantum computing to crack some of the tough mathematical problems on which key cryptography protocols are currently based? At our QuIC lab at the Raman Research Institute, we aim to counter this by using the same laws of quantum mechanics to make communications more secure. This is what is called quantum cryptography.
How I do it
There are many theoretical principles of quantum mechanics that are being used to establish a new paradigm for data security. The Non-Cloning Theorem, for example, effectively means an eavesdropper cannot get away unnoticed with simply copying the information, while the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle allow us to design protocols that would again give away the eavesdropper’s intent. Again, we have quantum entanglement, a kind of correlation that provides us with a tool to ensure that any kind of eavesdropping will be caught.
Quantum computing and secure quantum communications are the key focus areas of the National Quantum Mission announced last year. As physicists, we will aim to create quantum computers with more and more qubits, and also to keep extending the distance over which we can transfer data securely. We rely, among other things, on superposition, or the possibility of a system to occupy more than one state at the same time. This gives us access to a very large dimensional state space, making it possible to run quantum algorithms that are way faster than classical.
In the lab, we are also demonstrating quantum teleportation, which forms the basis for long-distance quantum information transfer using entanglement as a resource. This is the bedrock for quantum relay and repeater technologies that are used to increase the distance of quantum communications using entanglement as a resource.
We have been conducting real experiments on both quantum computing and quantum cryptography, and have demonstrated several groundbreaking results including new forms of quantum random number generation. Our work is being widely used towards long distance quantum communications, especially using satellite-based approaches.
We have been granted the Raman Research Institute’s first quantum technology patent and two more have been filed and are under review. I have also incubated a startup, Quantum Synergy, to act as a vehicle to take some of our experiments from the lab to the market
