Entry Date:
December 20, 1998

Optical and Quantum Communications Group

Principal Investigator Jeffrey Shapiro

Co-investigator Franco Wong


Quantum superposition and quantum entanglement are the bedrock on which new paradigms for information transmission, storage, and processing are being built. The preeminent obstacle to the development of quantum information technology is the difficulty of transmitting quantum information over noisy and lossy quantum communication channels, recovering and refreshing the quantum information that is received, and then storing it in a reliable quantum memory. The Optical and Quantum Communications group specializes in utilizing the quantum properties of light to improve information technologies, with a focus on communications, imaging, and computation. Work is driven by a close, synergetic collaboration between theory and experiments.
The central theme of the Optical and Quantum Communications Group has been to advance the understanding of optical and quantum communication, radar, and sensing systems. Broadly speaking, this has entailed: (1) developing system-analytic models for important propagation, detection, and communication scenarios; (2) using these models to derive the fundamental limits on system performance; and (3) identifying, and establishing through experimentation the feasibility of, techniques and devices which can be used to approach these performance limits.