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EPSRC Quantum Technology Fellowships awarded to early-career academics.

Left to Right: Dr Ruth Oulton and Dr Anthony Laing who are among the latest recipients of the EPSRC Quantum Technologies (QT) Fellowships.

Press release issued: 19 February 2016

The Centre for Quantum Photonics is pleased to announce that two more of their academics, Dr Anthony Laing and Dr Ruth Oulton are among the latest recipients of the Quantum Technologies (QT) Fellowship, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). These fellowships will support the UK’s activities as a world leader in QT in order to meet future needs across the science and technology base.

Dr Ruth Oulton, Senior Lecturer in Physics, will spend five years developing quantum devices that produce single particles of light, very precisely, one by one.  These are known as ‘single photon sources’ and are as important to fledgling quantum photonic technological applications as the compact semiconductor laser was for DVD technology and optical fibre communications systems.

During her fellowship Dr. Oulton will use almost the same semiconductor technology to develop the single photon sources as is used in today’s commercial telecoms systems. These devices will be fed into quantum integrated chips that simulate how complex molecules involved in drug development behave. Dr Oulton said “with just tens of perfect single photons, we can start to calculate molecule formation in fractions of a second – the best supercomputers in the world would take months to do the same calculation.”

“Single photons will send information around the world in optical fibres that is encrypted securely, guaranteed by the laws of physics.  Scientists may use single photons as the most delicate proof of interactions in nano-sized material which means the semiconductor single photon source will be as important for the 21st Century as the laser was in the 20th Century.”


Dr Anthony Laing
, Lecturer in Quantum Physics, will spend five years developing quantum photonic devices that simulate molecular dynamics at a scale where even supercomputers have been unsuccessful. Computer simulations of physical models have become a vital tool in science and engineering. The number of possible configurations of any quantum system grows exponentially with its degrees of freedom, just like the number of heads/tails configurations of a row of coins doubles with each additional coin. Since a quantum system can exist simultaneously across all of its configurations, its evolution is too large to be simulated with a classical computer.  Therefore, quantum mechanical models for classical computers are necessarily limited while more complete models are fundamentally intractable to classical simulation.  Yet increasingly, scientists need to understand the role of quantum mechanics, for example in biological molecules.

Dr Laing noted that “the famous physicist and Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, identified this problem in a seminal lecture in 1982 - he also proposed a solution.  Feynman suggested using one controllable quantum system to simulate the model for the quantum system one wishes to study. Because of an elegant mathematical mapping, photons are a natural quantum simulator for molecular dynamics.  This opens up huge new possibilities such as the discovery of new molecular behaviour that leads to new drug design.”

Their success follows our announcement last year that Dr Jonathan Matthews and Professor John Rarity who are also members of the Centre for Quantum Photonics were awarded EPSRC QT Fellowships to further their work in ‘Photonic Quantum-Enhanced Sensors’ and ‘Spin-photon systems for scalable quantum processors’ respectively.

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