IPIC, the Research Ireland Centre for Photonics, based at Tyndall National Institute (a research flagship of University College Cork) is pleased to announce that a pan-European consortium, led by Dr Gediminas Juska, has been awarded a European Innovation Council (EIC) grant through its Pathfinder Open instrument. The grant, worth €3M, is titled QCEED “Quantum Dot Coupling Engineering (and dynamic spin decoupling/deep nuclei cooling); 2-Dimensional Cluster State Generation for Quantum Information Processing” and was developed from an initial concept by Drs Emanuele Pelucchi and Gediminas Juska of the Epitaxy and Physics of Nanostructures Group at Tyndall.
QCEED brings together some of the world’s leading researchers in semiconductor nanotechnology design and fabrication, applied to quantum photonics, in a risky and highly interdisciplinary research project. The overarching objective of QCEED is to find solutions to current bottlenecks to quantum computation with integrated photonics. If successful, large scale, on chip, quantum photonic computation will be significantly closer. “Scalable” photonic universal quantum computation exploits the measurement-based quantum computing paradigm relying on multi-dimensional photonic cluster states. However, the technological capability to generate on-demand, large-scale 2-dimensional cluster states has not yet been proven. QCEED will demonstrate the (large-scale, i.e., many photons) emission of 2-dimensional cluster states of light thanks to the development of new engineered paired semiconductor quantum dot (QD) systems, and the exploitation of advanced deep nuclei cooling and/or dynamic spin decoupling to improve system coherence time. QCEED will also tackle the essential requirement for scalable quantum computation -that is to efficiently funnel the generated photons into specific photonic modes.
The QCEED coordinator Dr Juska says, “I am very excited about the prospect of coordinating this innovative project with the other partners as we strive to open new horizons in photonic quantum information processing”.
Welcoming the news, Martin O’Connell, EU Programmes Manager at IPIC commented, “I would like to congratulate Drs Pelucchi and Juska on their success in this most competitive instrument of Horizon Europe. In 2024 only 45 high risk/high gain projects out of 1119 submissions were selected for funding so the award of QCEED is testament to the extremely high quality of both the concept and submission by the Tyndall-led consortium and am looking forward to hearing of the future solutions”
The QCEED project runs from Feb 2025 to Jan 2029 with other partners comprising of Masaryk Uni (Cz), CNR (It), Warsaw Polytechnic (PL), CEA (Fr), iii-V Labs (Fr) and Day One (It).
