News

Waterloo, Ont. (Wednesday, December 21, 2016) — Researchers from the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Canada are the first to transmit a quantum key securely from a source on the ground to a receiver on an aircraft. The uplink is a prototype for secure quantum communication and shows the viability of the team’s quantum communication satellite mission (QEYSSat) proposal.

Local artist creates visual project from random BIG Bell Test data

Do atoms behave differently when we are not looking at them?

The Bell test seeks to catch quantum particles “talking” to each other by matching their answers (output), to the questions asked (measurement). Unpredictable and independent input is one condition needed to perform Bell test experiments. Last week, the BIG Bell Test (BBT) brought true human unpredictability and randomness to the first ever human-driven Bell test.

A team of researchers from the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) has developed a process for reshaping the entanglement of two photons, demonstrating a new set of tools useful for quantum-state engineering.

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program has awarded more than $11 million to the University of Waterloo which includes $1.7 million to an affiliate of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC).

Two alumni attendees of the Institute for Quantum Computing’s (IQC) 2015 Quantum Innovators (QI) workshop joined IQC as faculty members on November 2. The workshop, held each year, brings the most promising researchers exploring the frontiers of quantum physics and engineering to IQC. Experimentalists K. Rajibul Islam and Crystal Senko have been jointly appointed as Assistant Professors with IQC and the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Faculty of Science at the University of Waterloo.

Zhe Liu, postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) and the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, received the 2016 FNR Outstanding PhD Thesis award for his research on the security of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The FNR Awards recognize outstanding researchers and science communicators for excellence in research and science communication.

Researchers at IQC led the development of a new extensible wiring technique capable of controlling superconducting quantum bits, representing a significant step towards to the realization of a scalable quantum computer.

Jon Yard joins the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) as Associate Professor from Microsoft’s Research Station Q team. He is jointly appointed with the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization in the Faculty of Mathematics and as an Associate Faculty member with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI).

A new science exhibition from the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) aims to make quantum science and technology more accessible for everyone.

A team led by Thomas Jennewein at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), supported by the National Research Council of Canada’s (NRC) Flight Research Laboratory, has successfully demonstrated quantum key distribution (QKD) between a transmitter on the ground and a receiver payload onboard an airplane. While researchers in Germany and China have previously conducted QKD experiments with quantum transmitters flown on an aircraft and a tethered low-altitude balloon, Jennewein’s team is the first to demonstrate a QKD link with an airborne quantum receiver.