17 December 2019

The Swedish Research Council has awarded SEK 1.4 million to SECRET, a European collaborative project to increase security in quantum communication. The project, with a total budget of EUR 340,000, will be coordinated by LiU researcher Guilherme Xavier.

The laboratory of quantum communication at the Department of Information Coding. Photographer: Thor Balkhed

Guilherme Xavier, senior lecturer and researcher at the Division for Information Coding, has been awarded SEK 1.4 million from the Swedish Research Council under a call for project grants for international collaboration within quantum technology.

The aim of the project is to develop a theoretical and experimental framework for a future quantum internet, which will be based on the optical fibre network that is currently being constructed for telecommunication.

Quantum cryptography and quantum communication are based on the fact that entangled photons can influence each other over long distances. Evidence for this phenomenon has come from several experiments, most recently the Big Bell Test. Entanglement is central to increasing security in the networks.

The researchers now plan to construct a standard and certified experiment in order to enable entanglement to be used in practical applications in quantum communication and quantum cryptography.

Part of a larger EU collaboration

The research project has been given the name “SECRET”, which is constructed from its title: “SECuRe quantum communication based on Energy-Time/time-bin entanglement”. It is part of a larger EU collaboration between 26 countries within quantum technology: QuantERA.

SECRET will be coordinated by Guilherme B. Xavier and includes, in addition to LiU professor Jan-Åke Larsson, researchers at universities in Padua, Italy, and Seville, Spain. The project has a total budget of EUR 340,000 for three years.

More information about QuantERA Extern link

Translated by George Farrants

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