Narrow Results

Future Extremely Large Telescopes, very fast photon detectors and extremely accurate and stable clocks will push the time resolution and time tagging capability of astronomical observations towards the limit imposed by Heisenberg uncertainty principle, thus paving the way to a novel Quantum (or Photonic) Astronomy. The capability to time tag the arrival time of each photon to the 10 picosecond level for hours of observations, over several narrow bandpasses, resolved in polarization state and direction of arrival on the focal plane of the telescope, will generate an impressive amount (up to 100 Terabyte a night) of multidimensional data. It is the purpose of the present paper to expound this new frontier of Information Technology applied to Astronomy.

The main topic of this paper is to introduce the Quantum Information theory, emphasizing its good properties, but also clarifying common misunderstandings. Quantum Information theories and technologies have indeed many positive and interesting features, and hold promises of great developments. However, there are also problems. At present time, we can count a very small number of quantum algorithms, for example Quantum Fourier Transform, Shor's and Grover's. Grover's Algorithm in particular is capable of accelerating the search of elements in a large database. In our opinion, future evolutions of such algorithms will be successfully applied to the world of data handling, for example to satisfy astronomical needs when its time resolution capabilities will be pushed toward Heisenberg quantum limit.