Optical Switching And Networking For Quantum And Classical Data Centers

: Quantum computing is mostly confined within a single box and able to achieve computational performance of a limited number of qubits. As any classical computing system its scalability will fundamentally depend on dynamically interconnecting many qubit processing blocks to increase qubit count worth of computation. Also, quantum computing will have to interface and interconnect with classical computing systems in a data centre environment.

The project will design and prototype one of the critical building blocks for distributed quantum and classical computing, the optical switch. We will explore theoretically and develop experimentally switching technologies aiming to deliver key characteristics for quantum and hybrid quantum+classical compute networked systems; very low loss, very low noise / high extinction ratio and fast reconfiguration.

The project will also simulate and model how the switching can be used to form network systems to create distributed quantum and classical computing.

It will formalise and parameterise the requirements as well as explore the dependencies between technologies (photonic quantum processors, heterogeneous computing, interconnects), distributed computing tasks (such as collective operations), quantum information transfer methods (quantum teleportation via photon entanglement) and networking to identify performance (entanglement rate, fidelity, scalability) and operational limits.