MSc Project opportunity in Professor Stephanie Wehner’s group
Daily Supervisor: Scarlett Gauthier (PhD candidate), contact s.s.gauthier@tudelft.nl

Summary

The goal of this project is to investigate how different metrics used to evaluate the quality of end-to-end
links in a quantum network relate. One way to approach this problem is through simulation. By evaluating known
performance metrics on simulated network architectures with a variety of hardware parameters it will be possible to
investigate the connection between metrics.

Details

In order to evaluate the utility of a quantum network or channel relevant performance metrics are a necessity.
Two commonly employed performance metrics are the Secret Key Rate (SKR), which arises in the context of quantum
key distribution (QKD), and the success probability of verifiable blind quantum computation (VBQC). If for a certain
network a value of one of these performance metrics is known, a natural question to ask is whether anything can
be said about the value of the other metric. As a starting point for characterizing the solution of this problem, this
project proposes the use of the discrete event network simulator NetSquid to evaluate both performance metrics for
end-to-end links in a quantum network with varying hardware parameters and network architectures.
Possible questions to investigate include:
• For a given network architecture with slowly varying hardware parameters, is there a consistent relationship
between the two metrics?
• Are the two performance metrics equally sensitive to changes in network architecture and hardware parameters?
• How strongly does the relationship between performance metrics depend on the channel noise model for links
in the end-to-end pathway considered in the network?