Attendance was at a record high as the fifth edition of WACQT's annual May meeting took place between 14 – 16 May. Approximately 170 PhD students, postdocs, researchers, industrial partners, advisors – among them a Nobel Laureate – active in WACQT gathered to take part in the centre's development and activities during the past year.
The three-day event was packed with poster sessions, lectures on current research projects, lab tours and overall conversations about the status and future of WACQT.
“The impressive number of participants is partly due to a constantly growing group of PhD students and postdocs connected to the centre, but also to the fact that a Swedish infrastructure for quantum communication, NQCIS, has been implemented and is going in a positive direction,” says Per Delsing, Director of WACQT.
National infrastructure for quantum communication in place
Alongside KTH, who is coordinating the consortium, NQCIS involves Chalmers, Linköping University and Stockholm University, as well as the companies Ericsson AB, Quantum Scopes AB and quCertify AB. With the aim to create a national community focused on advancing quantum technology and foster collaboration between research partners and industrial companies, NQCIS will test and deploy quantum key distribution systems tailored to the specific needs of Sweden.
“NQCIS is truly an offspring of WACQT and of Swedish excellence in the field of quantum communication," says Katia Gallo, Director of NQCIS and Coordinator of the Quantum Communication pillar in WACQT.
”Building up such an infrastructure is a stepping stone to bring quantum technology to fruition in real world applications and lower the thresholds for Swedish public and industrial actors to engage in the field, reaping the benefits of state of the art quantum technology for secure communications. It is also exciting for us to work side by side with other countries Europe in the ambitious joint endeavor to realize the first pan-European quantum-secured network, EuroQCI, by 2028,” she says.
“Apart from the cutting edge research that we are striving to achieve, I believe the education and training initiatives that are supported through WACQT and NQCIS to develop teaching modules, outreach material for both budding scientists, that is students and researchers at all levels, and the general public are an absolute necessity to create a quantum informed community,” says Vaishali Adya, WACQT Fellow and deputy co-ordinator of NQCIS.
And for Vaishali, it is the support and networking opportunities during the event that are of particular value.
“The biggest take away for me was the support of the advisory boards for the NQCIS project and the quantum communication pillar in general. The networking that I managed to do with other principal and project investigators of WACQT helped me build a larger collaborator base wherein we can explore new technology together,” says Vaishali.
WACQT's scientific advisory board, SAB, wishes to highlight the infrastructure for quantum communication as a strong contributing factor to the centre's positive development in the past year - as well as three of the new Fellows who have joined the centre in the last 12 months, Vaishali being one of them.
“SAB was particularly impressed by the increased number of activities and ongoing projects within the pillars quantum sensing and quantum communication, partly spurred by Sweden's national investment in infrastructure for quantum communication. We were also pleased to hear talks from the three excellent new WACQT Fellows, Anton Frisk Kockum, Armin Tavakoli and Vaishali Adya who were hired in 2023,” says Steve Girvin, Professor of quantum physics at Yale University and chairman of WACQT's scientific advisory board.
Quantum testbed now up and running
Another important 2024 milestone has been the launch of the centre's quantum testbed, which has been made available to WACQT's researchers and partners since its official opening earlier this year. The testbed provides access to first-class possibilities for evaluating both quantum technology hardware and software and is already being met with great interest.
“We are experiencing a lot of interest in our testbed services in general, largely in the form of requests for workshops, lab tours and expert group meetings, where companies can learn more about us and how we can support them in the field of quantum technology. Currently, we are very busy building the team and the lab, building supporting software and administrative infrastructure, and interacting with companies,” says Miroslav Dobsicek, head of the WACQT Quantum Technology Testbed operated by Chalmers Next Labs.
And even though just under three months have passed since the official opening, many pieces are already starting to fall into place.
“We are now finished with the employment phase and have employed a total of eleven people. We are installing and testing cryogenic equipment, microwave components and room temperature instruments in the lab. We have also secured office space at the Stena Center where we sit together with other quantum technology companies, such as Atlantic Quantum, ConScience and WACQT-IP. We have entered into a collaborative testing agreement with Scalinq, which is our first simplified business case, and so far, we have reached out to five spin-off companies from WACQT and discussed their needs for the test bed,” says Miroslav.
“We’re looking forward to getting our hands into it”
With an agreement with IBM signed in January 2024, researchers and developers now also have access to IBM’s 127-qubit Eagle and 133-qubit Heron quantum processors through the testbed.
“IBM Quantum service is actively used by three researchers at Chalmers, and Gothenburg University and Linköping University have recently signed a Frame End User Agreement for the service and more researchers from these universities will be added shortly. In addition, seven Swedish companies and universities have shown interest in the service, and they are now in the process of a legal review of the agreements. Some of these companies and universities are already WACQT partners, others are not and there is a potential that they will become partners in order to be able to use the service, which would be a very positive development,” says Miroslav.
One of the industrial partners who is now looking forward to investigating new research questions with the help of the test bed is Beatriz Grafulla, research leader at Ericsson.
“At Ericsson we are very excited about the testbed that WACQT is offering. It will not only allow us to run experiments to validate our assumptions, but also to explore and investigate new research questions in the field of quantum computing. We are looking forward to getting our hands into it!” says Beatriz.
For her, the annual May meeting provides an opportunity to meet other actors from academia and business with the same interests.
“As in every annual WACQT meeting, my main takeaway is the impressive amount of work that the centre is doing in the field of quantum technologies. It is a fantastic opportunity to meet the significant international quantum community and to strengthen the collaboration between academia and industry,” says Beatriz.
The presentation slides from the WACQT review meeting 2024 are available on WACQT intranet.