Dr. Kaushik Seshadreesan has been awarded an NSF CCF grant titled "Realizing Joint Detection Receivers for Quantum-enhanced Optical Communications using Photonic NISQ-era Quantum Processors" starting January 2022.
In this 2-year NSF project, Dr. Seshadreesan will design and implement quantum joint detection receivers for quantum-enhanced laser communications, which is relevant, e.g., in deep space optical communications. These receivers are quantum circuits, essentially, which will perform collective, quantum-domain processing of blocks of received optical pulses prior to their detection. The project will utilize a quantum decoding algorithm known as belief propagation with quantum messages (BPQM) to design the quantum circuitry of the receiver. One of the goals of this project will be to investigate the performance of the receiver circuits for different low-density parity check codes and for different optical modulation formats. Pertaining to the implementation, the receiver design readily translates into a quantum circuit that is executable on a near-term, non-error-corrected, photonic, noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processor capable of performing cat-basis quantum logic.
In collaboration with colleagues at Texas Advanced Computing Center, UT Austin and University of Arizona, this project aims to identify the resource optimal approach to photonic cat-basis logic by theoretical analysis, simulations, and experimental implementation on the photonic quantum hardware of Xanadu Quantum Technologies. The success of this project could potentially enable up to 5x higher optical communication rates over NASA’s future deep-space optical lasercom systems. Moreover, a successful realization of the receiver over Xanadu’s photonic processor would amount to a demonstration of quantum advantage over classical processing using a near-term noisy quantum processor in a practical application, which is an important quest in quantum information processing today