The European Research Council (ERC) awards annually a limited number of Starting Grants to excellence in the research domain. This year this prestigious prize has been assigned to Davide Bacco, QTI CTO, for his project QOMUNE: Quantum Optical Multidimensional Network.
Created by the EU in 2007, the ERC is the premiere European funding organization for excellent research. It provides funding to enable talented and creative individual researchers, to pursue the most promising avenues at the frontier of science. The ERC Starting Grant is among the most prestigious prizes for research worldwide.
The project QOMUNE, spanning on a five years timeframe, is aimed at the development of a network connecting multiple quantum devices and has been financed with a € 1.5 million Starting Grant.
The objective of the project is to create an innovative system exploiting the existing fiber optics networks to create quantum links on a global stage. The large scale deployment of quantum devices will indeed allow to have a new kind of Internet along with the classical one, a “quantum Internet”, that will provide unprecedented security through the interconnection of different quantum technologies.
Davide Bacco highlights the multidimensionality of the new quantum network, meaning that the particles, especially single photons, will move in a space of probabilities no longer bidimensional but multidimensional, potentially unlimited. The advantage of this technology is the possibility to exploit a higher communication bandwidth more resilient to external interferences, allowing to redefine the current limits of quantum communications.
Davide Bacco is a researcher at the University of Florence. After a PhD at the University of Padua, Davide Bacco moved to Denmark Technical University (DTU) where he obtained several national and European awards for his high level research. Davide Bacco is among the co-founders of QTI where he is Chief Technology Officer.
QTI makes his warm congratulations for this outstanding prize, that testifies the quality of the company’s experts and is a great reason of pride.
