Sunday, September 20, 2015

AWS Suffers Sunday Morning Anomalies in Virginia

Amazon Web Services experienced significant error rates for a number of its cloud services in the the US-EAST-1 region ( northern Virginia data center). The disruption occurred between 2:13 AM and 8:15 AM PDT, when AWS posted that the issue was resolved.

Media websites reported that the AWS incident took down number a number of popular websites for the eastern U.S., including Netlix.

http://status.aws.amazon.com/?nc2=h_l2_su

NTT and University of Tokyo Cite Progress in Quantum Cryptography

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone(NTT) and The University of Tokyo reported progress in developing a quantum cryptography scheme that can assure security without monitoring the error rate of photon transmission.

In an article in the UK science journal “Nature Photonics”, the researchers describe a quantum key distribution (QKD) experiment based on a novel QKD scheme called the round-robin differential phase shift (RRDPS) protocol.

NTT said the experiment is the first demonstration of QKD based on “wave function collapse”, which is distinguished from previous QKD schemes whose security is based on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. A major finding is that QKD that does not require error rate monitoring between the sender and receiver.  This could lead to simple and efficient quantum cryptographic systems.

http://www.ntt.co.jp/news2015/1509e/150914a.html

Researchers at NTT Envision Quantum Repeaters in Future Photonic Networks



Researchers at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) and the University of Toronto are proposing all-photonic quantum repeaters for long-distance quantum communication.  If achieved, such devices would disprove the necessity of matter quantum memories in long distance quantum communications, which is seen by many as the ultimate future of optical communications. In a paper published this week by the journal Nature Communications,...


Advancements in Semiconductor Quantum Dots with Single-atom Precision



Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), the Paul-Drude-Institute (PDI; Germany), and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL: USA) have cooperatively developed a novel quantum dot (artificial atom) and used it to crate artificial molecules with single-atom precision. The achievement was achieved using a clean surface of semiconductor single crystal thin film manufactured by Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) by using a low-temperature, Scanning Tunneling...


NTT Develops Long-lived Quantum Memory



NTT, in partnership with Japan's National Institute of Informatics and Osaka University, announced a new approach in the development of a long-lived quantum memory that could be used in quantum computing. The research involves a superconductor diamond quantum hybrid system in which a dark state was shown to be 150 ns, an order of magnitude longer than previous attempts to hold state. By using a gap-tunable superconducting flux qubit, the researchers...


NTT Creates Quantum Buffer in Optical Waveguide



Researchers at NTT have developed a quantum buffer on an optical waveguide that takes advantage of the "slow light effect:, where the propagation speed of a pulsed light in a special optical waveguide slows significantly compared with the speed of light in vacuum. The company said this innovation facilitates the precise synchronization of photons, thereby creating a buffer that could be used to create quantum computers.  Experiments have shown...