Ageing in the Global South Project

Project Overview

Information technology (IT) is shaping our society in a truly fundamental way, akin to what the industrial revolution did nearly three centuries ago.

The fastgrowing need to communicate and process information pushes the development of faster and more powerful IT devices. Our need for mobility requires them to be ever more portable, small, and light.

Such a race towards miniaturisation is leading us to the possibility to engineer and realise logical gates – the building blocks of CMOS- based electronics – based on the working principles of elementary constituents of matter like single atoms, or ultra-low intensity light.

When information is encoded in and processed by such simple carriers, the laws of quantum mechanics become predominant: Enter the domain of quantum technologies, where counterintuitive phenomena entailed by the quantum superposition principle enable unrivalled computational power, unbreakable communication security, and exquisite sensing capabilities.

The Quantum Technology group at Queen’s (QTeQ) pushes the boundary of quantum information processing and quantum technologies by exploring the potential benefits of quantum resources, investigating the impact of energy-exchange processes at the fundamental quantum level, and designing protocols for the harnessing of quantum parallelism for computational purposes. 

Led by Gabriele De Chiara, Alessandro Ferraro, and Mauro Paternostro, QTeQ investigates frontier topics such as quantum machine learning, the foundations of quantum theory and the thermodynamics of quantum processes. The group is a major player in the race to push quantum technologies all the way up to space applications for the construction of a genuine quantum internet leveraging existing satellite-based technologies, and a pioneer in the use of information theoretic approaches to the exploration of quantum gravity.