Quantum Enabled Applications

It is interesting to note that limitations imposed by the quantum theory like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle or the non-cloning theorem lead to interesting applications like QKD or in metrology. I will give a short introduction to QKD and its state of the art. Then, I will show that shot noise can be exploited in many ways. A first application, which is not surprising, is the use of shot noise for random number generation. Indeed, noise in modern cameras is heavily dominated by shot noise, so random numbers of quantum origin can be extracted from virtually any picture. Interestingly, this inevitable shot noise allow us also to achieve steganography in a provably secure way. Steganography may eventually be the only way of private communications in countries under a totalitarian regime. Finally and most importantly, the study of the entropy related to shot noise allows us also to design a new compression algorithm for pictures, which allows at a the same time high compression factors and neglectable (and quantifiable) information loss. This is of huge importance in many application with an exploiting number of high resolution pictures.