AV¶ÌÊÓƵ

Nicolas Gisin wins the Micius Quantum Prize

His work on quantum cryptography has earned him worldwide renown. If further proof were needed, Nicolas Gisin, Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Science, was awarded the Quantum 2023 Prize by the Chinese Micius Foundation on Wednesday 2 October.

You have to go back to the early 1990s to trace the moment when cryptography irrevocably captured the imagination of the Genevan physicist. With a background in quantum physics and five years' experience in the telecommunications industry, he read the first concrete description of a quantum cryptography experiment in a scientific journal. It wasn't long before he realised that his research group had the knowledge and equipment needed to carry out such an experiment themselves.

Everything followed on from there. In 1993, he published in the journal Europhysics Letters the work of his team, which had succeeded in transmitting an embryonic encryption key - the one used to encode messages - across a kilometre of optical fibre. These results launched the UNIGE team into the world of international physics. Then, in 1997, the journal Science reported on the first quantum entanglement experiment carried out by Nicolas Gisin's group in optical fibres over a distance of 10 kilometres, between the villages of Bernex and Bellevue.

Mastering the phenomenon of entanglement opens the door to ‘quantum teleportation’, i.e. the transfer of the physical state of one particle (the value of its polarisation, for example) to another, via a pair of entangled particles. In 2003, the Geneva team succeeded in achieving the first long-distance quantum teleportation in telecoms optical fibres. That same year, Professor Gisin's work was named one of the 10 technologies of the future in a ranking drawn up by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review. The physicist was also awarded the Prix Marcel-Benoist, Switzerland's most prestigious scientific distinction, in 2014. He is also one of the founders of the id Quantique spin-off, a pioneer in the commercialisation of quantum solutions.

The Quantum Prize is a further tribute to a career dedicated to exploring the future. Named after Micius, an ancient Chinese philosopher, the eponymous foundation created the Quantum Prize in 2018 to reward scientists who have made outstanding contributions in the field of quantum communications and quantum simulation.

Ìý