Michael Vasilyev’s goals in his
research are simply stated: increase by tenfold the amount of information that
can be securely transmitted via the Internet and the distance over which that
data can be transmitted.
Vasilyev, a UT Arlington
associate professor of electrical engineering, is participating in an $8
million research project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency
that enlists five universities and three companies to study advanced quantum
Conventional or classical
communication transmits information by “bits” that take values of either one or
zero. In contrast to that, quantum communication uses quantum bits, or “qubits,”
which, in addition to being one or zero can also be in a
"superposition" state, which is both one and zero simultaneously.
The qubits are represented by quantum-mechanical objects, such as
single photons, that can provide a much higher level of protection from
eavesdropping than classical communication signals.
“There are all
kinds of personal information – both among private citizens and public
governments – that require the utmost security,” Vasilyev said. “Quantum
communication offers the most rigorous solution for security because it
employs the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics to enforce the
exclusive linkage between the sender and the receiver, with no chance of
other people eavesdropping.”
Jean-Pierre Bardet, dean of the UT Arlington College of Engineering, said Vasilyev’s work is essential to expanding the data information superhighway.
speed, storage and security are crucial elements as our
information-based society continues to grow and mature,” Bardet said.
“Dr. Vasilyev’s work demonstrates the important role UT Arlington
engineers are playing as we investigate these critical issues in shaping
network security and capacity for the future.”
Vasilyev said one
of the challenges in current technology is that today’s secure quantum
communications can be done at any meaningful speed only over short
distances, about 100 kilometers before the signal breaks down. Longer
distances can only be used at the expense of a dramatic reduction in the
transmission capacity. Qubits cannot go through optical amplifiers,
commonly used in classical communications, without losing their
quantum-mechanical security advantages, he said.
“It opens the possibility of hackers intercepting a message that must be made secure,” Vasilyev said.
lab will encode information in spatial features or pixels of the
photons that are sent through multimode fiber-optic lines to
dramatically increase the amount of received data without jeopardizing
its security protected by quantum mechanics.
“We will transmit
multi-pixel spatial patterns to encode more and more information into
single photons,” said Vasilyev, who noted that Northwestern University
is the prime contractor for the nationwide project. Vasilyev’s portion
of the larger grant is $675,000 over four years.
participants in the project will contribute technologies such as quantum
frequency conversion, quantum repeaters, arbitrary waveform generation
and advanced coding schemes to further increase the capacity and
distance of the secure information transmission. Other participants
include: the University of California, Davis; University of Calgary,
Canada; Montana State University; Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge,
Mass.; Advanced Communication Sciences, Piscataway, N.J.; and NuCrypt
LLC, Evanston, Ill.
Vasilyev added that the technology developed will be useful for classical communications as well.
Internet is facing a capacity crisis,” Vasilyev said. “If the current
rates of network traffic growth continue, we could be out of bandwidth
by 2020, unless we start harnessing the spatial degrees of freedom of
photons in a fiber.”
Vasilyev’s recent research focused on
dramatically reducing the cost of transporting data over the Internet
backbone. His group, in collaboration with the University of Vermont,
has developed regeneration technology that restores the quality of
optical signals at multiple wavelengths simultaneously, without ever
converting them to electrical signals.
“The power of optics is in
its capability to process many independent high-speed data streams in
parallel,” Vasilyev said. “So far, we have been applying this power to
multiple wavelengths. With all possible wavelengths exhausted, we’re now
turning to multiple spatial pixels to keep the capacity growing.”
University of Texas at Arlington is a comprehensive research
institution of more than 33,800 students and 2,200 faculty members in
the heart of North Texas. Research activity has more than tripled over
the past decade to $71.4 million last year with an emphasis on
bioengineering, medical diagnostics, micro manufacturing, advanced
robotics and defense and Homeland Security technologies, among other
areas. Visit www.uta.edu to learn more.