Columbia Connected To New York Quantum Network

Entangled photons will soon make their way instantaneously across the growing network, which now extends 70 miles from Long Island to Morningside Heights.

Under perfect traffic conditions, the drive from Columbia University in Manhattan to Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island will take over an hour; try to leave during a Friday rush hour, and the time can easily double (or even triple). But as of today, information traveling to and from these research institutions will soon be instantaneous, with Columbia’s connection to the quantum network that is growing across New York.

The SCY-QNet, funded in part by the National Science Foundation National Quantum Virtual Laboratory (NQVL) program, will connect 10 locations, including Stony Brook University, Columbia, Yale, Brookhaven, and Qunnect, a quantum networking start-up. The effort is directed by Professor Eden Figueroa at Stony Brook and includes research teams across the New York metro area that have been tapping into “dark fibers” to build one of the largest quantum networks in the United States. The second phase of this grant, providing $4M in funding, was recently awarded to a team composed of Columbia, Yale, and Stony-Brook researchers.

“This state-of-the-art quantum network connecting regional partners is a physical manifestation of a long-standing and growing intellectual collaboration among our institutions,” said Jeannette Wing, executive vice president for research and professor of computer science at Columbia. “Our collective strengths in science and engineering are pushing the frontiers in quantum information science, transforming vision to reality. I can't wait to see what we will light up with entangled photons as a means to communicate.”

Columbia Connected to New York Quantum Network
Follow the growing quantum network, which stretches via fibers from Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University on Long Island into Columbia in Manhattan and, via lasers over Long Island Sound, to Yale University in Connecticut.

On September 30, Columbia’s hookup was completed: photons, the quantum particles that make up light, can now be distributed and detected from Long Island to Morningside Heights. Entangled photons, one of the cornerstones of quantum science that enable instant information transfer, will soon follow.

The network will link different quantum devices, including quantum sensors and computers, that are under development at the partner institutions into a nascent quantum internet. At Columbia, it now reaches three labs: those of Gil Zussman, Sebastian Will, and Alexander Gaeta:

• The Glue: Gil Zussman, Kenneth Brayer Professor of Electrical Engineering, provided access to the optical fibers needed to transport entangled photons; these fibers were originally deployed for the NSF COSMOS testbed. Seed funding from Columbia Engineering and the Data Science Institute allowed the team to expand the network to Qunnect in Brooklyn. An expert in classical networking and communications, Zussman will also help develop new protocols and standards to efficiently send information along the quantum network.
• The Device: Sebastian Will, associate professor of physics and co-PI on the NQVL grant, is developing quantum devices that will send and receive information via the entangled photons transmitted along the network. His lab has been pioneering techniques to trap individual atoms into arrays that can serve as quantum bits, or qubits—a rapidly evolving approach to quantum computing, one of the goals of the NQVL collaboration.
• The Translators: Alex Gaeta, David M. Rickey Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science and professor of electrical engineering along with Michal Lipson, Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering and professor of applied physics (and a co-PI on the NQVL grant), will make sure the devices at the network’s nodes, like Will’s atomic arrays, can “talk” with the entangled photons, which will be transmitted along the network’s fibers at a different wavelength than the devices can understand. Experts in quantum optics, Gaeta and Lipson have created quantum frequency converters that can change the wavelength of photons without breaking the entangled states that are essential to the network.

“At Columbia, we are combining our expertise in networks, optics and photonics, and atomic physics to tackle open questions in quantum networking,” said Will. “Now the fun can really begin.”