News

How can we ensure our data is secure when carrying out day-to-day transactions? Quantum physics has the answer! By using photons, a secret key can be securely transmitted between two users, so allowing them to privately communicate. But up to now, the efficiency with which the photons were detected has restricted more widespread use of this technology. Our team has broken the record for secret key rate transmission by a factor of 6! The results are out now in Nature Photonics.

More great news from our ETPA research! A new paper by the group gives a theoretical analysis of ETPA to better understand how its cross-section in chromophores (the part of a molecule responsible for its colour) varies, depending on the coherence time of the incident entangled photon-pair and the excited states of the chromophore. The team found a periodic dependence on the coherence time, with the predictions confirmed by molecular quantum mechanical calculations for several chromophores.

A new paper from our quantum sensing efforts is out! We studied five chemical compounds (chlorins) from Pacific brittle stars, which can be used in anticancer therapies where light is exploited to destroy cancer cells. By measuring the phosphorescence of singlet oxygen produced by the chlorins, we discovered they made a large quantum yield when illuminated. These studies identify an arsenal of brittle star chlorins with great potential for application in photodynamic anticancer therapies.

Fadri Grünenfelder has received his PhD for work related to Quantum Key Distribution Thesis Title: Performance, Security and Network Integration of Simplified BB84 Quantum Key Distribution

The public open day for the Ancienne Ecole de Médecine saw enormous interest in the activities of the university of Geneva and our activities. Thousands turned out to visit the new and the old building and enjoy the demonstrations and explanations of our research in quantum science.

The official inauguration of the Ancienne Ecole de Médecine, took place on the 27th of September marking the return of the Department of Applied Physics to this landmark building in Geneva.

The Geneva Quantum Centre is a brand new initiative, bringing together all aspects of quantum science and technology at the University of Geneva.

The Geneva Quantum Centre held its first event with a small symposium at the Campus biotech. This kickoff event brought together for the first time all the researchers from the university involved in the centre.

Our recent demonstration of local and scalable detection of genuine multipartite single-photon path entanglement has been published in Quantum. We construct a scalable entanglement witness that can be implemented with local measurements only, and experimentally demonstrate its applicability on an 8-partite single-photon path-entangled state.