Spain’s ICFO Receives €1.7M for Quantum Research

18 December 2015—The Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO; Barcelona, Spain) announced this week that the AXA Research Fund has awarded €1.7 million to establish a permanent chairmanship for quantum cryptography at the ICFO focused on data security. The goal of the project is to develop and implement quantum encryption systems that are 100 percent secure.
 
The AXA Research fund, a science philanthropic initiative founded in 2007 by the insurer AXA Group, boosts global scientific research that focuses on understanding and preparing for risks affecting life, the environment and socio-economic areas. The ICFO project will address rising data security issues that affect governments, the private sector and society. Research results funded by AXA are available to the public.
 
Antonio Acin, professor of quantum optics and leader of the quantum information group at ICFO, will chair the research for the first five years. Acin is a previous recipient of three prestigious grants from the European Research Council, and is a pioneer in quantum information with a focus on protocols that can code information for absolutely non-violable transmission.
 
“To break these protocols would be to go against the laws of quantum physics,” said Acin, “which is something that has never been achieved.”
 
Today’s devices, for example, smartphones, require data to be sent at increasingly smaller scales, said Acin, and soon, many scientists predict that quantum technology will drive our data communications. To prevent data hacking of future quantum-based information packets, Acin and his group will develop technology that exploits quantum entanglement and creates particle protocols for commercial use that are much more secure than existing quantum encryption protocols.
 
The AXA Research fund has committed €131 million to 449 research projects in 32 countries since 2007.