Bio

Hello, world! My name is Miles, and I'm a seventeen-year-old Canadian from Guelph, Ontario. I come from a family that could not turn on their first computer for about a month. These technological incapabilities of my predecessors are likely what forced me to become computer literate in the first place! One of my favorite childhood memories is of six-year-old me blundering about in Windows XP. Aside from my love of programming and screwing up my Linux distros, I am eagerly pursuing a career in physics research—as of right now I'm pretty interested in quantum optics, and I'm working as a research assistant for the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. I am also a guitar player and a little bit of a ski bum.

Project: Satellite QKD Simulation

Satellite quantum key distribution (QKD) is a method of securely exchanging an encryption key between two communicating members, named Alice and Bob, by sending a stream of photons (laser) at a satellite. QKD is theoretically 100% secure, due to some very important quantum mechanical effects of photons (the particle of light). Eve, the third party, is trying to eavesdrop on this key, and by measuring each photon, creates an effect that Alice and Bob can realize. This program gives a midlevel explanation paired with a partly realistic simulation of this process. Controls for the project include the option to eavesdrop on the photon stream (also called a quantum channel) of either Alice or Bob, the delay between each photon in the photon stream, the amount of background noise, the photon loss, and the initial length of the photon stream.