Photonics: How Quantum Light Is Rewriting The Future Of Computing And Communications

Light has always shaped the way we communicate, but in the quantum era it is starting to compute, protect, and even prove things in ways classical physics simply cannot.

Towards the goal of protect, we have quantum random number generation (QRNG) and quantum key distribution (QKD), where single photons and entangled states enable information-theoretic security guaranteed by the laws of physics. Beyond QKD, we look at emerging forms of quantum cryptography which promise entirely new security capabilities—including cryptographic tasks impossible classically.

However, real world quantum devices are generally imperfect in their implementation. Quantum hacking explores how attacks might exploit some such imperfections—from detector blinding attacks to trojan horse attacks—and how assurance frameworks, standards, and rigorous testing mitigate these risks to ensure that real-world systems remain secure.

This leads naturally into device independence: security based on using quantum properties such as entanglement to prove things about the security of your device, and make fewer – or no - assumptions about the internal workings of your hardware, closing entire classes of implementation vulnerabilities.

Finally, we step into quantum computing: how photonic quantum states are being used to compute, providing scalable quantum computation, and how quantum networks may one day interconnect processors into a distributed quantum internet.

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