Entanglement in orbit demonstrated with SpooQy-1 CubeSat

After slightly more than a year since the satellite has been deployed from the International Space Station, the experimental results of the SpooQy-1 mission have been published.

As described in the paper published in Optica, the team was able to generate and detect polarization entangled photon pairs on board the nano-satellite in low-earth orbit (LEO). A previous mission had been able to create photon pairs by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. This new milestone is the next step towards global quantum encryption satellite networks in the future.

While SpeQtral has been operating SpooQy-1 since December 2019, work on the next CubeSat mission at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) has been ongoing, with launch planned for 2022. This mission is planned to demonstrate a satellite-to-ground entanglement link in collaboration with RAL Space in the UK and support by SpeQtral.

SpeQtral being a spin-out company from CQT means that several of our employees have their origins in the SpooQyLabs group Alexander Ling and have co-authored this publication. So, we would like to congratulate our team members Aitor Villar, Alexander Lohrmann, Tom Vergoossen, Robert Bedington, and Huai Ying Lim on this great achievement!

More details on the context of the paper can be found in the highlights article by CQT:

https://www.quantumlah.org/about/highlight/2020-06-spooqy-quantum-satellite

About Centre for Quantum Technologies

The Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) is a national Research Centre of Excellence in Singapore. It brings together physicists, computer scientists and engineers to do basic research on quantum physics and to build devices based on quantum phenomena. Experts in this new discipline of quantum technologies are applying their discoveries in computing, communications and sensing. The Centre was established in December 2007 with support from Singapore's National Research Foundation and Ministry of Education. CQT is hosted by the National University of Singapore and also has staff at Nanyang Technological University. Learn more at www.quantumlah.org.