Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a method for two parties, Alice and Bob, to generate a shared secret key that is secure against eavesdropping, based on the principles of quantum physics. Recent research at ICFO has focused on continuous variable QKD (CV-QKD), which uses readily available optical components and existing telecom infrastructure.

When world-leading teams join forces, new findings are bound to be made. This is what happened when quantum physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) and the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig combined atomic and nuclear physics with unprecedented accuracy using two different methods of measurement. Together with new calculations of the structure of atomic nuclei, theoretical physicists from the Technical University of Darmstadt and Leibniz University Hannover were able to show that measurements on the electron shell of an atom can provide information about the deformation of the atomic nucleus.

Bluefors today announced the immediate availability of their new Ultra-Compact LD dilution refrigerator system – an all-in-one, compact cryogenic measurement system ideal for lab environments with limited space.

Scientists have developed a detection system that could vastly improve the accuracy of human facial and activity recognition at long distances and through obstructions like fog, smoke or camouflage. The research is published in the optics and photonics journal Optica and is a collaboration between the Single-Photon Group at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, led by quantum photonics expert Professor Gerald Buller, using equipment developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at California Institute of Technology and by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, and by the James Watt School of Engineering at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

Qubits—the fundamental units of quantum information—drive entire tech sectors. Among them, superconducting qubits could be instrumental in building a large-scale quantum computer, but they rely on electrical signals and are difficult to scale. In a breakthrough, a team of physicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) has achieved a fully optical readout of superconducting qubits, pushing the technology beyond its current limitations. Their findings were published in Nature Physics.

University of Queensland PhD student Ashlee Caddell co-led a study in collaboration with Germany's metrology institute Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), that searched for dark matter using atomic clocks and cavity-stabilized lasers.

It is difficult to imagine a world more dynamic and at the same time more inaccessible than the inside of a proton. The complex interactions of its constituent quarks, gluons and the constantly ‘churning’ sea of virtual particles can now be coherently described thanks to the skilful use of the tools of quantum information theory and the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. The new, more than hitherto universal formalism has made it possible, for the first time, to explain data from all available measurements related to the scattering of secondary particles produced during deeply inelastic collisions between electrons and protons. The team responsible for the achievement include theorists from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and Stony Brook University (SBU) in New York, Mexico's Universidad de las Americas Puebla (UDLAP) and the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow.

Physicists at MIT and Harvard University have now directly measured superfluid stiffness for the first time in “magic-angle” graphene — materials that are made from two or more atomically thin sheets of graphene twisted with respect to each other at just the right angle to enable a host of exceptional properties, including unconventional superconductivity.

Photosynthesis - mainly carried out by plants - is based on a remarkably efficient energy conversion process. To generate chemical energy, sunlight must first be captured and transported further. This happens practically loss-free and extremely quickly. A new study by the Chair of Dynamic Spectroscopy at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) shows that quantum mechanical effects play a key role in this process. A team led by Erika Keil and Prof. Jürgen Hauer discovered this through measurements and simulations.

Rice University physicist Emilia Morosan is part of an international research collaboration that has been awarded multimillion-dollar funding from The Kavli Foundation to develop and test next-generation superconductors through artificial intelligence and quantum geometry. This global initiative, spearheaded by Päivi Törmä of Aalto University in Finland, seeks to push the boundaries of quantum materials science and superconductivity.