European Metrology Network for Quantum Technologies

Technology based on the ‘Hall effect’, which determines magnetic field strength by measuring the voltages induced by electric current, accounted for more than 50% of the €1.7 billion global market for magnetic sensors in 2019. Magnetic measurements are important to ensure the correct placement of batteries or device performance...

Telecommunication systems mostly rely on ‘singlemode’ optical fibres that allow only one path or ‘mode’ for light to travel as it propagates through the fibre. However, in many important industrial applications, such as in avionics or the automotive industry, ‘multimode’ fibres are required. In multimode fibres light can follo...

Over the next decade or so, methods currently used to encrypt data may become ineffective in the face of advances in quantum computing, potentially leaving communication networks and services vulnerable to eavesdropping. Security could instead be assured by Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), a category of technologies that apply q...

Resources are being invested globally in a race to develop practical quantum computing systems, driven by expected vastly superior problem-solving capabilities. When realised, quantum computers would have very different characteristics to ‘classical’ computers. This presents a foreseeable threat to Europe’s digital economy, as...

Current encryption methods would be easily defeated by algorithms running on a working quantum computer. In such a security environment, commercial sectors such as banking, communications and data storage will demand new encryption tools to ensure valued data can remain ‘quantum-safe’ In theory, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) ...

Europe is launching 22 satellites as its new global positioning system Galileo expands. This will provide robust, secure location and timing signals to European users, removing reliance on other countries, and opening new markets for high performance products that require precision time and frequency signals. Satellite positio...

Banks and internet companies need very accurate time and date stamps to send information and process high frequency transactions. As the technology used gets faster, greater timing precision is required. Atomic timekeeping, provided by National Measurement Institutes, supplies the highest timing accuracy, but these clocks are b...

Introducing innovative products such as novel optoelectronics based on quantum dots, nanowires and nanorods or wear resistant coating using new nanostructures relies on having confidence in how these materials behave at the nano-scale. Understanding the strength of materials at the nano-scale as opposed to in bulk is essential...

The secure exchange of keys used to encrypt and decrypt information is a weak spot in many cryptography systems. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) uses single photons to share encryption keys between two parties, who are connected via an optical (fibre or free-space) channel. By measuring the photons’ properties, it’s possible to ...

The ability to measure single photons of light is gaining importance in emerging research applications from space-earth communications with weak laser light sources, to event counting in biochemical microscopy important for tissue sample analysis, to silicon chip failure diagnostics using light emitted from transistors. All the...