Quantum Scheme Could Allow Submarines to Communicate Securely

Quantum Scheme Could Allow Submarines to Communicate Securely | Popular Science@import "/files/css/a1c433465f8fe485195cb11d70c36108.css";@import "/files/css/33f6b7ecb4513ed2fe6c670880a27187.css"; home Login/Register Newsletter Subscribe RSS GadgetsComputersCamerasSmartphonesVideo GamesCarsConceptsHybridsElectric CarsScienceFuture of the EnvironmentEnergyHealthPopSci Eco TourTechnologyMilitaryAviationSpaceRobotsEngineeringDIYProjectsHacksToolsAuto DIYMore From Our Partner: Toolmonger GalleriesVideosColumnsThe GrouseSex FilesGreen Dream Innovation ChallengesHow It WorksFeatures Tweet Digg Quantum Scheme Could Allow Submarines to Communicate Securely By Clay Dillow Posted 11.01.2011 at 2:41 pm 5 Comments
A Virginia Class Attack Sub Concept Artist's rendering. U.S. Navy via Wikimedia

Submarines are excellent at avoiding detection. When submerged they are so far off the grid, in fact, that it’s difficult for them to stay in contact with the naval bases that supply them with orders and information, or for them to beam information back to base. But a new quantum communications solution could change all this, allowing submerged submarines to communicate via laser pulses by exchanging encryption keys and messages over satellites.

Currently, submarines use randomized codes or “keys” to encrypt messages. These are established ahead of time between a sub and its communications base, and each code is only used one time so that an enemy cannot crack a code and use it to decipher future communications.

Related ArticlesNASA Puts Its Money on Quantum Communications, Plasma Propulsion, and Other Future TechWith New Quantum Encryption Scheme, Messages Can Only Be Read in Designated Geographical LocationScientists Reproduce Quantum Entanglement, Einstein's “Spooky Action” TagsTechnology, Clay Dillow, military, quantum communication, quantum entanglement, quantum mechanics, spooky action, submarinesBut this is problematic. For one, it is logistically cumbersome. And a submarine that’s going on a long-duration mission has to pack lots and lots of keys, which could fall into enemy hands if the sub is overtaken. Moreover, even with plenty of secure keys, the communications between sub and base are extremely slow. In order to penetrate water, transmitters have to use very low frequency radio waves. These only allow for a few characters to be transmitted each second. While the rest of the world (and the battle space) communicates at high speed, subs are stuck with dial-up. In order to send or receive information in bulk or at speed subs have to surface, and that leaves them visible and vulnerable.

But researchers at defense firm ITT have an idea. Using quantum key distribution, subs could encode a key into photons (using the photons’ polarization to represent ones and zeros) making for a virtually un-hackable key--any attempt to intercept the photons would disturb the quantum system in a measurable way, alerting the sender and receiver that a third party is listening in (this is generally achieved via quantum entanglement).

With a secure key established, submarines could then--theoretically at least--stay a few hundred feet below the surface and transmit photons via lasers to satellites, where they could be bounced back to a base on the ground. The researchers’ simulations apparently demonstrate a system that could send and receive data at rates of 170 megabytes per second while a submarine is below the water line. That’s video-worthy data streaming.

Of course, first you would have to figure out just how well photons will hold their quantum states as they travel through water, as any deviation that disrupts the quantum system would render the system insecure (and pointless). And then you need a satellite that can receive and relay quantum-encrypted signaling--again, without disrupting the quantum states of the photons. In other words, this technology is far from battle-ready. But it could someday take high-speed, secure data transfer to depths where it currently doesn’t exist.

[New Scientist]

Previous Article: Chinese Officials Deny Hacking U.S. Environment-Monitoring Satellites 5 Comments Link to this comment Grunt 11/01/11 at 3:25 pm

First, it is easily possible to float to the surface UHF or VHF antenna and communicate with a satellite, while the submarine is several hundred feet below water.

Now add to this line of underwater conduit a floating laser and the problem is solved. Radio waves to guide the laser towards the satellite and laser communication to make it harder to listen in too.

Link to this comment scientific anomaly 11/01/11 at 3:39 pm

i think they should make a drone that can be launched from the sub while it is still hundreds of feet underwater that goes to the surface, communicates whatever it is the people are trying to convey, then self destructs so the enemies cant get it and hack it or something.

-Knock knock
-Who's there?
-The Doctor.
-Doctor Who?
-Yes

Link to this comment Vector13 11/01/11 at 7:16 pm

@scientific anomaly

Well, the problem is with someone intercepting the transmission itself, not necessarily at the transmission point. Just as well, there would need to be a drone for every time someone wanted to transmit or receive a message, and that would be pretty cumbersome :p

Link to this comment TheZomb 11/02/11 at 1:14 am

This article is incorrect in several points. First, the codes submarines use to communicate aka one time pad ciphers are impossible to "hack" or break individually, no matter of time or computing power will ever break one. The only way to break a one time pad cipher is to use two encrypted with the same key to break each other. This is the real reason the codes can be used once. The sentence "These are established ahead of time between a sub and its communications base, and each code is only used one time so that an enemy cannot crack a code and use it to decipher future communications." is incorrect in that respect.

Second, Quantum encryption has nothing to do with entanglement and bits are not encoded by polarity. Its called quantum encryption because it relies on a superposition of states in the light particles being sent (like schrodingers cat) and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Each particle has a polarity, determined by the sender and unknown by the receiver. The receiver has to guess what polarity to use to decode a particle. If you guess wrong the data may not be encoded to bits correctly. You only get on chance to read a particle since reading it permanently changes its polarity. The sender and receiver then pick some at random and send them unencrypted, if they are the wrong polarity someone has tried to eavesdrop. The receiver then tells the sender all of his polarity guesses and then they use the bits from the correctly guessed polarities to form a one time pad cipher just like before.

Link to this comment gizmowiz 11/02/11 at 2:35 am

Wouldn't that in theory allow for an enemy to use detection systems to identify Photon signals being sent to a submerged sub and thereby LOCATE the sub EXCACTLY and blast it out of the water?

It seems plausible this could nullify the subs ability to play hide and seek.

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New light shed on the private lives of electrons: Lasers allow scientists to observe how electrons become entangled

ScienceDaily (July 3, 2011) — A Princeton researcher and his international collaborators have used lasers to peek into the complex relationship between a single electron and its environment, a breakthrough that could aid the development of quantum computers.

The technique reveals how an isolated electron and its surroundings develop a relationship known as a Kondo state -- a state of matter that is of great interest to physicists and engineers. The results not only yield insights into a long-standing quandary in theoretical physics, but also may help scientists understand how to store information at the smallest possible scales, which would open vast new realms of computing power.

"What we've done is illuminate the private life of a single electron," said Hakan Tureci, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton and a lead researcher on the project. "It's taken nearly a century to isolate, control and probe a single electron in this way -- an extraordinary feat enabled by quantum theory, cryogenics and nanotechnology."

The research was conducted by an international team of scientists from the United States, Germany and Switzerland. The researchers on the project included Tureci, Atac Imamoglu, a professor at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in Switzerland, Jan von Delft, a professor at LMU Munich, and Leonid Glazman, a professor at Yale University.

The key theoretical results and a proposal for testing the ideas experimentally were published March 11 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

These theoretical projections were recently confirmed in experiments led by Imamoglu, which were published June 29 in the journal Nature.

The research brings fresh insight to the study of the Kondo problem, a phenomenon first observed in the 1930s, when researchers were surprised to find that resistance to electricity flowing through certain metals increases at very low temperatures. Normally, resistance through metals decreases as temperature is lowered, but that was not the case with these metals.

The phenomenon was explained 30 years later by Japanese scientist, Jun Kondo, as resulting from the presence of cobalt or other magnetic impurities in the metals.

Scientists have further realized that the Kondo effect results from a relationship between electrons known as "entanglement" in which the quantum state of one electron is tied to those of neighboring electrons, even if the particles are later separated by considerable distances. In the case of Kondo effect, a trapped electron is entangled in a complex manner with a cloud of surrounding electrons.

Researchers have been intrigued by the Kondo effect in part because understanding how a trapped electron becomes entangled with its environment could help overcome barriers to quantum computing, which could lead to far more powerful computers than currently exist.

Previous observation methods allowed scientists to make measurements of the Kondo state, but could not provide information on how electrons developed such a relationship with their surroundings.

To better understand how an electron gradually becomes entangled in this manner with its environment, Tureci and his collaborators investigated the idea of using a laser to probe electrons evolving into the Kondo state. They first developed a theory about how laser light scattered off electrons could carry information about this process.

Depending on the state of the electron, they surmised, it should absorb different colors of laser light to varying degrees. The light reflected back would carry a signature of the entangled quantum state, offering a window into the relationship between the trapped electron and its environment.

To isolate the electrons, they proposed using nanostructured devices, small machines built one atom at a time that trap the electrons in small wells. The particles are only provided limited isolation in the wells and so eventually become entangled with a cloud of surrounding electrons in the device.

Tureci's collaborators in Switzerland tested the idea by projecting a laser beam on the device and measuring the light that was transmitted.

The light signature matched theoretical predictions. The researchers also found that they could use the light signatures to confirm when they turned the Kondo state off using a magnetic field.

"By doing this experiment," Tureci said, "we showed that you can extract this information that was previously unavailable in earlier experiments on the Kondo effect."

He said the finding could provide insight into quantum computing because entanglement, depending on its nature, could allow new ways of storing and processing information or could threaten to destabilize the computing process.

Whereas current computers use transistors to store "bits" of information as ones or zeros, scientists believe quantum computers might one day use trapped electrons that are entangled with one another as "qubits," the basic information units of quantum computing, which can have the odd quality of representing a blend of "one" and "zero" simultaneously.

A series of qubits could thus store exponentially more information than the 0 and 1 combination of classical bits.

While quantum computers could theoretically be far smaller and faster than transistor-based machines, using electrons or other sub-atomic particles as storage devices is no trivial feat.

The undesirable entangled relationship between electrons and their environment, such as that seen in the Kondo effect, can destabilize the desired relationship between trapped electrons that form the qubits and gradually destroy the information they store.

"Our technique offers a window into the Kondo state, allowing us a chance to study electrons that are highly entangled with their environments and understand how they got that way," Tureci said.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Princeton University, Engineering School, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Journal Reference:

C. Latta, F. Haupt, M. Hanl, A. Weichselbaum, M. Claassen, W. Wuester, P. Fallahi, S. Faelt, L. Glazman, J. von Delft, H. E. Türeci, A. Imamoglu. Quantum quench of Kondo correlations in optical absorption. Nature, 2011; 474 (7353): 627 DOI: 10.1038/nature10204

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

New catalyst will allow commercialization of revolutionary fuel cells

ScienceDaily (June 15, 2011) — Cheap, much lighter than before and allowing for continuous operation -- what traditional batteries can not offer -- direct formic acid fuel cells can revolutionize the portable electronics market. A new catalyst developed at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences will enable a widespread use of fuel cells, researchers say.

You can hardly find a consumer electronics user who would not be irritated by problems with power supply. The batteries run out quickly and require continuous replacements or take a long time charging. Fuel cells could significantly improve the comfort of using electronic devices. Their commercialization, however, is hampered by many technological problems. A new catalyst developed at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw represents a substantial milestone on the way to dissemination of cheap, durable, light and environment friendly fuel cells powered by formic acid.

Fuel cell is a device converting chemical energy into electric power. The current is generated directly due to fuel combustion in the presence of catalysts used on the anode and the cathode of the fuel cell. "Theoretical efficiency of conversion of chemical energy into electric power in the cells can reach even one hundred percent. The best present fuel cells, powered by hydrogen, reach up to 60% in real life. For comparison, the efficiency of low-compression engines is as low as 20%," says Dr Andrzej Borodzinski from the IPC PAS.

The biggest obstacle to dissemination of hydrogen fuels is the storage of hydrogen. The issue turned out to be extremely technologically challenging and still is waiting for satisfactory solutions. An alternative to fuel cells powered by pure hydrogen is the methanol fuel cell technology. Methanol, however, is toxic and the methanol powered fuel cells must be produced with expensive platinum based catalysts. Moreover, methanol fuel cells have low power and are operated at a relatively high and so potentially hazardous temperature (approximately 90°C).

An alternative solution is formic acid fuel cells. In this case, the reactions occur at room temperature, and the efficiency and power of these fuel cells are clearly higher than those for methanol ones. In addition, formic acid is easy to store and transport. To have, however, formic acid fuel cell stable in operation you need an efficient and durable catalyst.

"The catalyst developed by us has initially lower activity then the existing catalysts made of pure palladium. The difference disappears, however, already after two hours of operation. And further it is only better. Our catalyst is stable in operation, whereas the activity of a pure palladium-based catalyst decreases in time," says Dr Borodzinski.

An advantage of the catalyst developed in the IPC PAS, particularly important from the economic point of view, is that it preserves its properties while operated in formic acid of low purity. Such formic acid can be easily produced in large quantities, also from biomass, so the fuel for new fuel cells would be very cheap.

Formic acid produced from biomass would be a fully environment friendly fuel. The reactions involving formic acid in fuel cells generate as products water and carbon dioxide. The latter is, as a matter of fact, a greenhouse gas, but the biomass is obtained from plants which use carbon dioxide for their growth. As a result, formic acid produced from biomass and consumed in fuel cells would not change the content of carbon dioxide in atmospheric air. The risk of natural environment contamination by formic acid is also low.

Formic acid fuel cells would find numerous applications. They would be particularly suitable in portable electronic devices -- mobile phones, laptops or GPS-based devices. They could also be installed as power supply sources in vehicles, from wheelchairs through electric bicycles up to yachts.

At the IPC PAS the research is being undertaken on the first batteries based on formic acid fuel cells. The researchers expect that a prototype of a commercial device should be ready within a couple of years.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, via AlphaGalileo.

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

New catalyst will allow commercialization of revolutionary fuel cells

ScienceDaily (June 15, 2011) — Cheap, much lighter than before and allowing for continuous operation -- what traditional batteries can not offer -- direct formic acid fuel cells can revolutionize the portable electronics market. A new catalyst developed at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences will enable a widespread use of fuel cells, researchers say.

You can hardly find a consumer electronics user who would not be irritated by problems with power supply. The batteries run out quickly and require continuous replacements or take a long time charging. Fuel cells could significantly improve the comfort of using electronic devices. Their commercialization, however, is hampered by many technological problems. A new catalyst developed at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw represents a substantial milestone on the way to dissemination of cheap, durable, light and environment friendly fuel cells powered by formic acid.

Fuel cell is a device converting chemical energy into electric power. The current is generated directly due to fuel combustion in the presence of catalysts used on the anode and the cathode of the fuel cell. "Theoretical efficiency of conversion of chemical energy into electric power in the cells can reach even one hundred percent. The best present fuel cells, powered by hydrogen, reach up to 60% in real life. For comparison, the efficiency of low-compression engines is as low as 20%," says Dr Andrzej Borodzinski from the IPC PAS.

The biggest obstacle to dissemination of hydrogen fuels is the storage of hydrogen. The issue turned out to be extremely technologically challenging and still is waiting for satisfactory solutions. An alternative to fuel cells powered by pure hydrogen is the methanol fuel cell technology. Methanol, however, is toxic and the methanol powered fuel cells must be produced with expensive platinum based catalysts. Moreover, methanol fuel cells have low power and are operated at a relatively high and so potentially hazardous temperature (approximately 90°C).

An alternative solution is formic acid fuel cells. In this case, the reactions occur at room temperature, and the efficiency and power of these fuel cells are clearly higher than those for methanol ones. In addition, formic acid is easy to store and transport. To have, however, formic acid fuel cell stable in operation you need an efficient and durable catalyst.

"The catalyst developed by us has initially lower activity then the existing catalysts made of pure palladium. The difference disappears, however, already after two hours of operation. And further it is only better. Our catalyst is stable in operation, whereas the activity of a pure palladium-based catalyst decreases in time," says Dr Borodzinski.

An advantage of the catalyst developed in the IPC PAS, particularly important from the economic point of view, is that it preserves its properties while operated in formic acid of low purity. Such formic acid can be easily produced in large quantities, also from biomass, so the fuel for new fuel cells would be very cheap.

Formic acid produced from biomass would be a fully environment friendly fuel. The reactions involving formic acid in fuel cells generate as products water and carbon dioxide. The latter is, as a matter of fact, a greenhouse gas, but the biomass is obtained from plants which use carbon dioxide for their growth. As a result, formic acid produced from biomass and consumed in fuel cells would not change the content of carbon dioxide in atmospheric air. The risk of natural environment contamination by formic acid is also low.

Formic acid fuel cells would find numerous applications. They would be particularly suitable in portable electronic devices -- mobile phones, laptops or GPS-based devices. They could also be installed as power supply sources in vehicles, from wheelchairs through electric bicycles up to yachts.

At the IPC PAS the research is being undertaken on the first batteries based on formic acid fuel cells. The researchers expect that a prototype of a commercial device should be ready within a couple of years.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, via AlphaGalileo.

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

Video: Robot's Supersonic Air Jets Allow it to Climb Just About Any Surface

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