Entanglement Management and Control in Transparent Optical Quantum Networks

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The DOE SC program in Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) hereby announces its interest in entanglement management and control in transparent optical quantum communications networks. Recently, tremendous progress has been made in understanding how quantum information with its complex characterization can be geographically distributed to achieve extraordinary capabilities that are impossible using classical optical telecommunication networks. This process involves quantum entanglement, a complex and valuable but perishable resource in which the transmitted quantum information is encoded. Although the transmission of an entanglement state over a dedicated single-hop channel has been successfully demonstrated, the distribution of a large number (several thousand) of entangled states in multi-hop and multi-user mesh-topology quantum networks remains an open challenge. The focus of this FOA is on entanglement traffic engineering - the scalable management and control of a large pool of quantum entangled states carried over multi-hop multi-user optical quantum networks. This announcement is based on the vision of universal transparent quantum networks described in the quantum networks for science workshop report [1] and on an earlier SC program announcement to the national laboratories [8] focusing on the development of basic network components such as quantum transductions, quantum frequency converters, quantum repeaters, and generic quantum networks nodes hosting Quantum Information Science (QIS) applications. The ultimate aim is to develop quantum network capabilities to support the vision articulated in the quantum internet blueprint workshop report [9]. While a universal transparent optical quantum network should be able to allow users to distribute different entangled states (including squeezed states), the interest in this announcement is on bipartite hybrid Discrete Variable/Continuous Variable (DV/CV) [2,3,4,6] entanglement. Applications that focus on the theoretical foundation of entanglement engineering in quantum networks described above are welcomed; however, priority will be given to applications that emphasize both theoretical and - potential uses of their research results in a quantum network testbed. This FOA seeks to advance understanding of how entanglement operates in quantum networks: The engineering challenges of how to optimize a quantum network will build on this foundation of basic research.

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