Wits PhD student cracks the high-dimensional quantum code

An emerging South African talent in the study of quantum optics, Isaac Nape, is part of a team of Wits physicists who led an international study that revealed the hidden structures of quantum entangled states.

The study was published in the renowned scientific journal, Nature Communications, August 27. Nape is pursuing his PhD at Wits University and focuses on harnessing structured patterns of light for high dimensional information encoding and decoding for use in quantum communication.

Earlier this year, he scooped up two awards at the South African Institute of Physics conference to add to his growing collection of accolades in the field of optics and photonics. He won the award for ‘Best PhD oral presentation in applied physics’, and jointly won the award for ‘Best PhD oral presentation in photonics’.

Now Nape and his colleagues at Wits, together with collaborators from Scotland and Taiwan, offer a new and fast tool for quantum computing and communication. “Quantum states that are entangled in many dimensions are key to our emerging quantum technologies, where more dimensions mean a higher quantum bandwidth (faster) and better resilience to noise (security), crucial for both fast and secure communication and speed up in error-free quantum computing,” he shared

He explained that they have invented a new approach to probing these ‘high-dimensional’ quantum states, reducing the measurement time from decades to minutes.

Nape worked with Professor Andrew Forbes, lead investigator on this study, as well as postdoctoral fellow Dr Valeria Rodriguez-Fajardo, visiting Taiwanese researcher Dr Hasiao-Chih Huang, and Dr Jonathan Leach and Dr Feng Zhu from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland.