Quantum Sensor Network

Introduction

A quantum sensor (QS) is able to measure various physical phenomena with extreme sensitivity. QSs have been used in several applications such as atomic interferometers, but few applications of a quantum sensor network (QSN) have been proposed or developed. We look at a natural application of QSN—localization of an event (in particular, of a wireless signal transmitter).

 
In the context of QSN, this project designs efficient protocols for the estimation of binary parameter functions and investigates the benefit of entanglements in these settings. Entangled states are useful in QSN as they can improve the sensor performances. We first focus on binary sensors, or detectors that detect binary parameters. We aim to optimize the initial state of the QSN. This is challenging because the optimization search space is vast and needs to take the measurement into consideration too -- making the problem a double optimization problem. We develop theorems for the optimal initial state and search heuristics that match with the theorem. The project also investigates a real-world application using QSN — localization of events/transmitters using QSN.

Published Papers

1. Caitao Zhan, Himanshu Gupta, Mark Hillery, Optimizing Initial State of Detector Sensors in Quantum Sensor Networks, ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing (ACM TQC) 2024

2. Mark Hillery, Himanshu Gupta, Caitao Zhan, Discrete Outcome Quantum Sensor Networks, Physical Review A (PRA) 2023

3. Caitao Zhan, Himanshu Gupta, Quantum Sensor Network Algorithms for Transmitter Localization, IEEE QCE 2023

Presentation on YouTube