Transcript for:
Quantum Future with Jack: Module on Sensing and Communications

welcome back to our Quantum future with Jack hit this is a subject that most people find very you know esoteric and confusing and you do a beautiful job of making understandable and I think one of the things that's critical for these modules for our our digital entrepreneurs here is helping them understand that's not just sort something you read about and it's theoretical that this is going to have real applications this is going to change what's possible in the world it's going to change our lives in so many ways so in this module it's about sensing and Communications let's let's dive in Jack that's correct in fact Peter quantum mechanics is already impacting our lives today uh fmri functional MRI scans pet scans positron emission tomography that's all Quantum phenomenon those were developed by physicists and what's really funny is for example MRIs we call them MRIs in hospitals today the original name was NMR nuclear magnetic resonance but when they brought it to a hospital people freaked out nuclear nuclear uhoh and so they changed it and that was kind kind of a great marketing campaign right by G and others let's no let's call it MRI magnetic resonance imaging resonance it feels good okay so sensing and Communications so we already have quite of the some of these senses around today but now let's dive into this how do we actually make use of the quantum mechanical effects to sense things around us and so I'll give you some examples um let me first give you just an analogy before we dive into this uh initial use case right here which is let's take a thermometer let's say it's hundreds of years ago and I say Peter my good gentleman friend um I want to tell you about a new invention I have it is called the thermometer and it can go from uh this thing I'm going to call 0 degrees uh say Fahrenheit let's just use Fahrenheit for the moment 0 degrees Fahrenheit and it goes up to 20° Fahrenheit and it goes in gradations of 5 degrees that's what I can do I can do these Bunches of five and that's what I have I have four things four lines on my this thermometer and you're like Well Jack kind of a cool vention maybe I can use it for uh when it's really cold out and you know I'll use it to uh see if something's going to become ice or something like that but not particularly sensitive and not a particularly big dynamic range those are the two things that it's really not very good in right it doesn't have a big range of detection and also it's not very sensitive it only doing it in these big blocks of of temperature and then I came back to you a few years later and said okay you're right good feedback Peter thanks for that appreciate the feedback I have a new thermometer it goes fromus 00 to plus 400 in gradations of tth of a degree you're like wow that is a big leap frog in sensing capabilities that analogy I want to use now from classical to Quantum regime of sensing and so in the classical way we have all kinds of sensors we have EKGs we have eegs we have uh all kinds of different phenomena that we can sense around us magnetic fields and things like that but we're limited because of the classical realm that we have the sensors in in the quantum realm we can go beyond that here's one use case right here in front of us okay Seth Lloyd in um back a number of years ago wrote a paper in science talking about what he called Quantum illumination and what he meant by illumination is not kind of a light source but being able to detect something in a kind of a radar type format using quantum mechanics not just classical radar so we know radar is super valuable it's kind of like a core thermometer right that we need and so if you want you know World War II it was absolutely essential uh to the British making sure they knew that the planes were coming and ultimately to many other um applications there as well and today we use it in airports around the world but what if I told you that I can take the distance let's call it X between the radar Tower and the airplane and in a Quantum realm I can take that distance out to 5x or 10x in detection MH you can imagine applications of this kind of quantum radar that would be quite significant if I could know um through the clouds and the fog that a plane was coming to an airport much farther away we can probably you know have a more safe Airport System and detection system and and other other kinds of applications so this is one application of what Quantum sensing is about Quantum radar let's look at another kind of quantum sensor right here what we're looking at here is a is a startup out of Colorado I have nothing to do with the startup at all I never even met them but cpin is a company that is creating a Quantum sensor and that little black thing that you see there is a size of a ballpoint pen so they took something that years ago used to be the size of a huge tabletop into a ballpoint pen and there's a university in Nottingham that has taken about 30 of those ballpoint pen like Quantum sensors put it in kind of a bizarre cap that people can find on their favorite sech engine right now and they're detecting brain activity using these Quantum sensors so what is that actually measuring what it's measuring is small fluctuations in the magnetic field so we know from physics that every time there's electricity on the Move electrons on the Move we call electricity that Faraday showed us that there's magnetism associated with that it's called electric motor bingo so what we know if the brain has electric activity and it does there must be an Associated magnetic field with it and sure enough there's a very large device that a handful of hospitals have out there right which is not an EEG but an Meg a magnetoencephalography right so Meg instead of EEG but those are very large devices that have to be kept super super cold inside of them and you stick your head in one of them and obviously you're not very mobile right so if we wanted to say for example follow somebody in their home and in their workplace um and understand the task they're doing that's not a very good device it weighs two tons cost millions of dollars the mg of today but this kind of system here by the University of uh Nottingham in their hands being used to maybe build an me of the future future and so this is another application where we want to detect very small changes in the magnetic field around us and one of the things a Quantum sensor can do is to do that kind of thing and so you see some gas particles in there air you see a laser being shot into those gas particles and that forms a Quantum sensor that we can use to figure this out so those are two applications right there of quantum sensing we have a magnetic field and in this case it was a brain and the Nottingham folks are using it to try to make a new kind of brain sensor for the brain AC that would be complementary to an EEG Okay cool so now let's turn to Quantum Communications all right why Quantum Communications well if you and I were sitting here in 1969 we'd be talking about something called arpanet that is a handful of locations around the United States initially and ultimately globally and initially it was a couple of National Labs uh there was some universities involved and they said let's connect five or 10 of these universities in this quote internet right why internet because it's an inter Network it's a network of networks therefore an inter Network so if I have a network inside Stanford University and one at MIT and I connect those two networks I now have an internet and so 1969 was the birth of what you and I know today as the internet and we know the kind of implications and profound impact that the internet had as we're sitting here today A New Kind of Internet is being built right now a number of universities government institutions and others are building on the east coast and the West Coast they're building out the new kind of Internet a Quantum Internet an Internet that does not transmit just normal signals classical signals but is able to transmit Quantum signals we talked about entanglement earlier in a previous module we talked about how two particles even far apart could be entangled with each other I.E correlated with each other such that when I measure one the other one automatically goes into a certain State well a Quantum Internet is is a network that can maintain and transmit those Quantum kinds of signals aren't they transmitting them by measuring two entangled particles or are they measuring something else right so it depends on what we want to do with this Quantum Internet we can do many different things with it we'll measure in different ways and we'll transmit in different ways but there are fundamentally two ways of thinking about how we build this network terrestrially with fiber and also with satellites and so let's take a look at some of this right now what we see that Chinese doing right now is we're using satellites they're also using fiber on the terrestrial ground what is their satellite their satellite is called the missia satellite it's named after an ancient Chinese scholar it costs probably upwards of 6700 million it's up in the uh sky right now and what it does it entangles two photons up in the satellite and transmits one to one ground station and one to another ground station and the the record for Quantum entangled transmission prior to this satellite was 149 km in the Canary Islands they busted that record with 1,200 kilm in their first attempt and then more recently went and showed that between Beijing and Vienna they can transmit a Quantum entangled signal over 7,500 km okay so now the question is what good what are he going to do with it what is it exactly what's the meaning what is going on here so let's use this term QSC Quantum secure Communications because our viewers today are going to be hearing and reading a lot about QSC about Quantum secure Communications the fact is that as we'll see in a later module today Peter Peter Shaw demonstrated that a quantum computer one day will break all the security communication technologies that we have today all encryption modes have encryption mode the main one that we use known as RSA right after to revest Shamir and Adelman RSA encryption also known as public key cryptography pkc that's the generic word for What specifically is RSA this kind of equum that you and I are using on WhatsApp that you and I are using on putting our credit cards up into Amazon that you and I are using for payments bank to bank and banks are using for interbank communications as well all these kind of secure Communications that all consumers use billions of people around the world will be cracked by quantum computers eventually not yet not yet okay will be one day and so because of that a number of countries and companies and others have realized it is time to figure out a means of transmission that is impervious to Quantum Computing attack and the only thing that we know of that is impervious to Quantum Computing attack of cryptography is a Quantum means of communication a Quantum encryption exactly a Quantum secure encryption and that's what is happening right now on this satellite the the means of transmitting messages using this particular satellite cannot be cracked ever by any quantum computer now or in the future it is not a question of size or scale of that quantum computer the very laws of quantum mechanics itself mean as we said before measurement impacts the actual object in quantum mechanics and so if we were sitting in either an airplane or some drone next to that signal and we tried to measure that signal to intercept that signal by the active measurement itself we'd be destroying the signal itself so the best we can hope for is a denial of service attack the best we can hope for is to deny the signaling of that particular message but all you have to do is have multiple of those machines transmit lots of messages around and youd get around that denial of surface attack a denial of surface attack has to be successful 100% of the time the sender only has to be successful one out of the millions of times they send it and so ultimately they'll be able to get that message through and so a Quantum secure way of sending a message is a way of making sure that you're impervious to Quantum Computing attack now here is something that only recently have people begun to realize snd DL why another abbreviation Jack I'll tell you why okay at least it's not a TLA a three-letter acronym it's exactly so send now decrypt later means what it means that if you and I are wanting to uh find each other's messages and right now we're intercepting each other's RSA encrypted messages right using the normal protocols we have today what I can do is I can store your messages here's Peter's message here and here's Jack's messages over there now we can't read them now so we do is we store them now and one day when we have a quantum computer that we can actually use to crack them we crack them and read them retroactively M so that retroactively they were actually not secure now you might say Jack it might take years to for us to get such a quantum computer well yes but there are some things worth knowing even years later right so in fact if I'm transmitting some super secret formula for a new pharmaceutical or something like that and you are industrial Espionage coming from a certain place or country and you want to intercept that you may not be able to read it for many years but once you read it you'll have that information and of course government to government that's also quite significant so there are startups right now thinking about uh beginning Quantum encryption and making that available today that's right so what are they doing exactly well prior to this super secure what we call unconditionally secure quantum C communication that is it's not conditioned upon any lack of computational power or things like that we have what's called Quantum resistant Communications what is quantum resistant communication just really as it implies it is not impervious to attack by a quantum computer however it is resistant so that it's kind of like a speed bump if you were if you and I wanted to burglarize a house okay and we had two houses to choose from one has an alarm system has that big ADT sign one doesn't which one we going to go for the one that doesn't sure and so Quant quum resistance is just that it kind of like a speed bump that says to people with quantum computers hey don't look at that message go to the message that doesn't have the resistance thing go some place easier yeah exactly so that's what some startups are doing today exactly okay so let's move on we talked about how they now demonstrated from Beijing to Vienna and here is the video transmission using Quantum secure encryption with the video transmission happening right there and this all relates to something we call quantum teleportation despite the fact that you and I are absolutely in love with Star Trek and I've watched it since we were kids um this is not unfortunately that kind of teleportation uh I could I could Cru my fingers but um yeah so we're not teleporting anything physical we're not teleporting atoms here we're teleporting a state of information that's still quite profound and is this theoretically over any distance yeah over any distance right and so the beautiful thing about quantum teleportation is this is a protocol that was developed years and years ago this is not new we knew how to do this for many years but now we finally have the engineering to actually implement this over longer distances and so we can do it with a satellite we can also do it over terrestrial lines right now up to about 150 to 200 kilometers after that you need what we call a Quantum repeater which we don't have yet and so that remains to be done in the future but quantum teleportation I just want folks um viewing this to really you know they'll they'll start hearing about this term again it's not teleporting anything physical it is teleporting something that is a state and so if I have an El in state up and I want to transmit that to you uh in a long distance hundreds of thousands of miles away or maybe even another planet I can do so using quantum teleportation and we can do that in a secure manner amazing so just to finish we now can see that we can have a national or even Global Network of combinations of terrestrial and satellite and that could form a global new kind of Internet a global Quantum Internet and that is now in our near future is to have not only the internet as we know it today but a Quantum Internet right alongside that what's your prediction when are we going to see that first actually entering use well the government NSF and others have already given the first grants uh to start enabling small Pilots amongst various universities and National Labs so I expect both an East Coast and West Coast uh small networks over the next two three years and I would say over the next five or 10 years uh this kind of network will be built out incredible so Quantum sensing is here there are entrepreneurs building sensors startups out there right now and Quantum Communications I mean I can imagine that this is fundamental to every government fundamental to uh banking the banking system B Finance everything energy utilities anything that has to be secured in a really strong way we'll have to use these kinds of protocols Peter so it's 2030 when this becomes a baseline I think by 2030 every major corporation and certainly governments will have to use this for their most sensitive information now there'll be lots of other information that we continue to use either traditional RSA or as we just mentioned Quantum resistant protocols where it's not as sensitive information and so for our WhatsApp messages probably no one really wants to spy on the fact whether we're going to dinner at a Tai place or a Korean place but the fact is that for more sensitive information I think people will have to start moving to these kinds of protocols amazing so that's it for this module where we going in module number three module number three we're now going to come to the core of quantum Computing itself we're going to dive into how do these computers work what are they made of and what kind of applications can we use them for amazing so I hope you've enjoyed that uh stay tuned and join us for module three on our Quantum future Jack a pleasure thank you Peter