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Kavindu Sellahewa, a PhD researcher in the Emerging Networks Lab Division at Walton Institute, recently had the opportunity to represent the Institute on a collaborative visit to the United States under CoQREATE.
The €3m funded CoQREATE (Convergent Quantum Research Alliance in Telecommunications) initiative is a US-Ireland R&D partnership between CONNECT and IPIC (Ireland), the Center for Quantum Networks (US) and QTeQ (Northern Ireland), investigating technologies that will form the foundations of a quantum internet, enabling deep collaboration between quantum and classical networking communities.
This visit was initiated as a part of Kavindu’s PhD funded under CONNECT – Science Foundation Ireland’s Centre for Future Networks and Communications – and supervised by Dr Deirdre Kilbane, Director of Research at Walton Institute. The visit lasted approximately 55 days, from the end of May to mid-July in 2024.
“This was my first experience in the United States, and I was excited to explore educational and cultural activities. My work was at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst), a the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system. I had a fantastic experience there with food, culture, social activities, and more.
“From a research perspective, I engaged in quantum communication research via satellites at Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences in UMass Amherst with my team led by distinguished computer scientist at UMass Amherst Prof Don Towsley, along with team members Dr Nitish Panigrahy, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at SUNY Binghamton, and PhD researcher at UMass Amherst, Albert Williams,” explained Kavindu.
“Our research focused on investigating practical solutions to increase the secret key rate (SKR) in Quantum Key Distributions (QKD). During this period, we developed a novel idea of designing quantum link reflectors to be placed at high altitudes, which would act as virtual transmitters to ground stations. Our work demonstrated excellent results and more benefits than conventional satellite-to-ground direct communications. We will work on this topic further to bring the theoretical idea into real-world implementations in the near future.
“Before returning to Ireland, I had the chance to explore some cities, such as Boston, MA, and Kingston, Rhode Island. I also went whale-watching with my lab mates in Boston, which was amazing.”
The trip for Kavindu was very productive and a great experience he was proud to be a part of. Kavindu looks forward to continuing his research and completing his PhD.