Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany
Internship Explorer
Internship Explorer
Quantum technologies are progressing from theoretical studies and proofs-of-concepts to deployed systems with real-world applications, such as securing communications via Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). However, current QKD networks employ trusted nodes to relay quantum information over long distances and significant technological advancements will be required to enable QKD at global scales. To do so, a promising network architecture is to combine the use of free-space optical links, which have losses scaling quadratically with the link length, and satellite-based quantum repeaters, which can generate long-distance entanglement at the endpoints via entanglement swapping. Quantum memories are a key enabling technology to implement it, but their performance in terms of coherence time, storage capacity and bandwidth has to increase by orders of magnitude in order to support QKD and other applications. The goal of this master thesis is to analyse a novel concept, recently developed in our group, for a fully-optical quantum memory which, from preliminary investigations, seems to be feasible with current technology and to be reaching or exceeding the performance requirements of a satellite-based repeater network.
