Bringing quantum communication closer to true network implementation – Innovation Toronto

Wits Researchers demonstrate a new quantum approach for sharing a secret amongst many parties, setting a new record for the highest dimensions and parties.

Laser & Photonics Reviews published online the research by the Wits team led by Professor Andrew Forbes from the School of Physics at Wits University. In their paper titled: Experimental Demonstration of 11-Dimensional 10-Party Quantum Secret Sharing, the Wits team beat all prior records to share a quantum secret.

“In traditional secure quantum communication, information is sent securely from one party to another, often named Alice and Bob. In the language of networks, this would be considered peer-to-peer communication and by definition has only the two nodes: sender and receiver,” says Forbes.

“Anyone who has sent an email will know that often information must be sent to several people: one sender and many receiving parties. Traditional quantum communication such as quantum key distribution (QKD) does not allow this, and is only of the peer-to-peer form.”

“In essence, each party has no useful information, but if they trust one another then the secret can be revealed. The level of trust can be set from just a few of the parties to all of them,” says Forbes. Importantly, at no stage is the secret ever revealed through communication between the parties: they don’t have to reveal any secrets. In this way a secret can be shared in a fundamentally secure manner across many nodes of a network: quantum secret sharing.

“Our work pushes the state-of-the-art and brings quantum communication closer to true network implementation,” says Forbes. “When you think of networks you think of many connections, many parties, who wish to share information and not just two. Now we know how to do this the quantum way.”

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