The European Research Council has awarded an ERC Starting Grant to Tim Taminiau. The grant (1.5 million euros for a five-year program) will allow him to pursue ground-breaking ideas for the next generation of quantum computing.

Tim Taminiau (1981) is senior scientist at QuTech. His team studies diamond-based qubits and their applications in quantum science and technology.

At the core of quantum information science is the quantum bit or qubit. Whereas a classical bit has a definite value of 0 or 1, a qubit can exist in two states (both 0 and 1) simultaneously. This physical phenomenon is called superposition and allows for substantially more complex computations. Unfortunately, quantum states are extremely fragile, and a key question for scientists is whether quantum states can be protected from errors.

Tim: “The way to overcome this problem is to protect quantum states using quantum error correction (QEC). A promising approach in this respect, is to distribute quantum states and error correction over a quantum network.” Using the ERC starting Grant, Tim aims to realize such quantum networks by using particles of light to connect qubits in diamond through the physical phenomenon of entanglement. “The goal the ERC proposal is to demonstrate that errors in quantum states can be detected reliably over such quantum networks.”

The network approach simplifies scaling-up quantum systems. “Reaching this goal will be a potentially decisive step towards larger quantum networks and distributed quantum computations. We will enter a new territory in which quantum states can be made more stable, by making networks larger and larger,” said Tim.

Visit the ERC website for more information about the ERC grants and their winners.