Our colleagues are working on several projects. One of those projects revolves around the further development of a 'Quantum Measurement Infrastructure' (QMI), a Python 3 framework for controlling instruments in laboratories. The framework has applications ranging from one-off scientific experiments to robust institutions.
QMI is designed to support advanced experiments involving quantum bits. It must be reliable, accessible to researchers and remotely controllable. The goal is to make the QMI software open source by 2022 so that other research institutes can also benefit from it. Research groups from the Quantum Internet Division are particularly involved. They study the entanglement of photons over distance, and how this phenomenon can be used to transmit data via existing optical fibres. Due to the overlap in instrumentation, algorithms and methods between the research groups, it is beneficial to bring all related software together.
A bottleneck in the development of the new software is that different users want to use the device at the same time. A requirement is therefore that multiple users can work with it reliably and safely. For example, a user can reserve the device for his own process by means of a context locking mechanism. This still needs to be covered by edge cases, such as ‘How does one handle a user cancelling his process?’