The goal of my project is to adapt the ALOHA receiver algorithm for messaging conflicts in classical receivers to handle quantum signals. In radio communication, errors in received signals are dominated by thermal noise, so the error function over which radio receivers are optimized only takes into account classical uncertainty. For optical communication however, the error associated with incoming messages is dominated by quantum mechanical uncertainty. Thus, the error function that governs optical receiver messaging conflicts must be modified to handle quantum signals. For my project, I will model quantum coherent state measurement and aim to determine the coherent state encoding that optimizes messaging throughput in the optical receiver.

I am very excited to explore the intersection of physics and electrical engineering through my SuperUROP project this year! Quantum communication perfectly combines my interests in the two fields and offers a lot of interesting, uncharted problems to explore.