It’s undeniable that Ahmedabad has become a force to reckon with in the sphere of technology. According to market estimates, last year the Information Technology sector saw deals ranging from Rs 7 crore to Rs 40 crore.
That Ahmedabad is highly acclaimed as a digitally-progressive city could be gauged by the words of Isro’s chairman S Somanath.
On the sidelines of the inaugural session of the Param Vikram 1000 High-Performance Cluster (HPC) computing facility at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Somanath said Ahmedabad would be crucial to develop India’s un-hackable and secure quantum communication capabilities.
Somnath was quoted as saying, “Our team in Ahmedabad has demonstrated their capability in short-range optical quantum communication or QKD over 300m. We are taking this technology to our satellites. We are trying to build payloads that could communicate with each other in space in a closed loop without signal attenuation via QKD, but there were some improvements which were required.”
He added, “Ultimately, we are trying to build our own QKD satellite. Unless that happens, a quantum-terrestrial link is not possible. We will try again and are embedding this technology in our future launches.”
Additionally, he mentioned that under the watch of the National Quantum Mission, various institutions had been developing quantum computing capabilities, quantum sensing and metrology and quantum materials and devices.
For the uninitiated, QKD involves sending encrypted data. It could be in the form of an email, a video call or a banking transaction over a network. A news report explains that the keys to decrypt the email are transmitted in a quantum entangled state called qubits to the receiver.
A senior PRL official told the daily, “Quantum physics says that you cannot copy or observe a quantum state without changing it. This means that if someone tries to eavesdrop on the key, they will disturb the photons and create errors that can be detected by the two parties.”
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