Quantum technologies at PTB

Two workshops are taking place these days at the “Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt” in Braunschweig, Germany. The topics are

The idea is to serve as a networking event for the German quantum technology community, both from science as well as industry, and to collect input towards a “quantum competence” center, which is now being established at the German national metrology institute PTB.

InfiniQuant was invited to give a talk on the practical challenges for a startup project hosted in the field of quantum cryptography. The program of the first workshop can be summarized:

  • Tutorials on quantum technologies (q. mechanics, q. metrology, atomic q. systems, photonic q. systems, solid-state q.-systems and electrical q.-metrology)
  • Block 1: Clocks, time and frequency
  • Block 2: Electrical quantum metrology
  • Block 3: Atom interferometry and geodesics
  • Block 4: Single photon metrology and quantum cryptography

The second workshop has just started and will have the following program:

  • Tutorials on quantum communication (Q.-information, Q.-cryptography, Hardware components)
  • Industry contributions (QKD as a network operator; The price of security/QKD; Optical precision measurements forĀ  q.-technology; Space-based, global q.-communication)
  • Quantum technology and the German Security Agency (BSI)
  • Industrial requirements on networks (QRANGE project (Bosch), Cyber-Secruity and q.-technology)
  • Activities of the flagship
  • Panel discussion

Both events help the German quantum community further grow and connect, especially now in times of world-wide quantum flagship activities.

Photonic Days in Berlin Brandenburg

The yearly photonic days of Berlin and Brandenburg took place in mid October this year. With them, a special symposium on “Photonics for secure and high speed communication” was held, for which the program can be found here. As part of the symposium, the current state of the art of quantum communication was discussed. InfiniQuant was invited to present the status of continuous-variable quantum key distribution in this exciting session with the following talks:

  • Dr. Janik Wolters from University of Basel: “Quantum repeaters – the backbone of secured communication”
  • Prof. Dr. Ronald Freund from Fraunhofer HHI in Berlin: “Quantum-Secured German Internet”
  • Imran Khan, InfiniQuant/MPL Erlangen: “Commercializing continuous-variable quantum key distribution”

A common denominator of the session was the European Quantum Flagship, which currently offers many possibilities to push basic research towards real world applications. The potential for innovation in quantum technologies is high and the InfiniQuant team is actively participating in what is called “the second quantum revolution”.

Max-Planck Day

On September 14, all Max-Planck-Institutes in Germany opened their doors for the interested public to get a peek into state of the art basic science. The motto of the day was “Wonach suchst du?” (engl.: what are you looking for?). This served as a theme to collect questions from the public and post them together with answers from scientists on the campaign website.

50 volunteers at our Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen volunteered to present our scientific work to the general public. With over 700 interested visitors, 10 different laboratory tours, 10 hands-on experiments and 4 scientific talks, the day was a great success. One of the demonstrated experiments was a fun game by InfiniQuant where to goal was to guess the next number a quantum random number generator would produce. It gave us the opportunity to combine the interesting science behind the game with some fun rewards and entertained visitors.

To catch a glimpse of the day, check out the video on Facebook.