We are seek­ing soft­ware engi­neers to join our efforts to build quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­works!

Back­ground

The vision of a Quan­tum Inter­net is to pro­vide fun­da­men­tal­ly new inter­net tech­nol­o­gy by enabling quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tion between any two points on earth. Such a Quan­tum Inter­net will – in syn­er­gy with the ‘clas­si­cal’ inter­net that we have today — con­nect quan­tum proces­sors in order to achieve unpar­al­leled capa­bil­i­ties that are prov­ably impos­si­ble using clas­si­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

As with any rad­i­cal­ly new tech­nol­o­gy, it is hard to pre­dict all uses of the future Quan­tum Inter­net, but sev­er­al major appli­ca­tions have already been iden­ti­fied. One strik­ing appli­ca­tion of quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tion is quan­tum key dis­tri­b­u­tion (QKD), which allows two remote net­work nodes to gen­er­ate an encryp­tion key, enabling the exchange of secret infor­ma­tion between any users con­nect­ed to the Quan­tum Inter­net. The secu­ri­ty of QKD is guar­an­teed by the fun­da­men­tal laws of nature, and thus ful­ly future proof even against any attack­er pos­sess­ing a large-scale quan­tum com­put­er. Oth­er promis­ing known appli­ca­tions are clock syn­chro­niza­tion, extend­ing the base­line of tele­scopes, secure iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, achiev­ing effi­cient agree­ment on dis­trib­uted data, expo­nen­tial sav­ings in com­mu­ni­ca­tion, quan­tum sen­sor net­works, as well as secure access to remote quan­tum com­put­ers in the cloud.

Cen­tral to all these appli­ca­tions is the abil­i­ty to send quan­tum bits (qubits). Qubits are fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent from clas­si­cal bits. While a clas­si­cal bit can take only two val­ues, ’0’ and ’1’, a qubit can be in a super­po­si­tion of being ’0’ and ’1’ at the same time.

Quan­tum Inter­net at QuTech

QuTech pur­sues a tar­get­ed effort to make quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­works a real­i­ty, includ­ing both hard­ware and soft­ware at the cut­ting edge of research and devel­op­ment. In 2020, QuTech aims to estab­lish the first demon­stra­tion net­work link­ing quan­tum proces­sors in dif­fer­ent cities, and pur­sues a long term effort to enable long dis­tance quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Posi­tion

We are now seek­ing soft­ware engi­neers who want to join our team to make such net­works a real­i­ty. In this posi­tion, you will work in an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team of sci­en­tists and engi­neers on a high­ly ambi­tious and chal­leng­ing project.

Require­ments

• You enjoy work­ing in a team and bring excel­lent orga­ni­za­tion­al, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and inter­per­son­al skills
• You are cre­ative and flex­i­ble work­ing in a mis­sion dri­ven envi­ron­ment to real­ize quan­tum net­works
• You have expe­ri­ence in soft­ware engi­neer­ing prac­tis­es
• You have exper­tise in pro­gram­ming C, C++, Python, and enjoy sys­tem pro­gram­ming

How to apply

Appli­ca­tions via this appli­ca­tion form. Appli­ca­tion will be open until the posi­tions are filled. Start­ing date 1 Octo­ber 2018, nego­tiable.

For more infor­ma­tion please see the goals of QIA, or con­tact Prof. Stephanie Wehn­er (s.d.c.wehner@tudelft.nl, web­site)