The European Commission handed out its Descartes prizes for 2004 at a ceremony in Prague, Czech Republic, last December. A joint EU–US project team received one of two awards in the research category and shared half of the C1 million (about $1.3 million) prize. The IST-QuComm (Information Systems Technology-Quantum Communications) team, which is developing a global communication system using photons, was cited for “demonstrating a number of intriguing applications of quantum physics: from teleportation to the secure transmission of encrypted information over fibre optic cable links and through free space.” The team includes Thierry Debuisschert (Thales Group, France), Artur Ekert (University of Cambridge), Nicolas Gisin (University of Geneva), Richard Hughes (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Anders Karlsson (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm), John Rarity (University of Bristol), Harald Weinfurter (University of Munich), and Anton Zeilinger (University of Vienna).
After 29 years at Sandia National Laboratories, most recently as director of the...
