QKD Satellite Ground-Station

In 2020 a satellite constellation for a UK long distance QKD network was proposed [1] as a national security capability, spurred by the need to be ready for post-quantum security. To do this, a fleet of satellite sources will downlink to a series of NIR optical ground-stations. The group's goal is to develop the technologies to make this possible, and my place is working on the ground station. Following on from the previous student Elliot Hasting's work, the ground station needs to be able to align with great accuracy to a moving satellite and measure the very lossy quantum signal. For this PhD I need to make the telescope into a full "Bob" in the QKD protocol, able to point at a moving satellite; align the quantum measurement optics with a source a minimum of 575km away; compensate for the atmospheric distortion and motion of the satellite on the quantum signal and generate a shared key. This will start with doing this full protocol with a copy of the satellite "Alice" module on the ground over a distance of a few hundreds of meters. And then after a CubeSat is launched to do the same from Earth to Ground. My work on the ground-station also involves overcoming enables several other engineering challenges, including increasing the ground station portability, making the receive module telescope agnostic, making the ground station capable of transmission and further making it capable of transmitting an entanglement from an atom in a lab far from the ground station to a satellite.