FET Open Grant for Many Photon Entanglement
The Leiden Institute of Physics (LION) is the coordinating partner in the Qluster research project, which was awarded a 2,9 million euro FET Open grant by the European Union. The three-year project, which started on 1 December 2019, aims to produce many photon entanglement to aid quantum communication and computing applications.
'We are working on using quantum dots and resonant cavities to produce many photon entanglement in a deterministic way', says Wolfgang Löffler, leader of the Solid State and High Dimensional Quantum Optics Group at the Physics department of Leiden University, the Netherlands.
Many photon quantum entanglement offers new technological opportunities for quantum communication and quantum computing. Current methods of entangling photons are probabilistic, so it is challenging to obtain large numbers of entangled photons at a high rate. The Qluster project aims at producing up to 20 entangled photons deterministically, at a rate of millions per second.
Partners in the project are the CNRS research institutes in France, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Cambridge, the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas in Greece, and the University of Basel.
The FET Open research grant is part of the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union, which comprises nearly 80 billion euros. FET Open is aimed at collaborative high risk, forward-looking research, with an eye to innovation and application.