German Government Funds €16 Million ($18.3M USD) for Photonic Quantum Computer Development

Diagram of a Measurement Based Photonic Quantum Computer. Credit: University of Stuttgart / Stefanie Barz

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is providing this funding to a project called PhotonQ which will be led by the University of Stuttgart and include the Universities of Würzburg, Mainz and Ulm, the Technical University of Munich, the Institute of Microelectronics Stuttgart and Vanguard Automation GmbH. The goal of the four-year project will be to demonstrate a quantum computer with eight qubits that will use a technique called measurement-based quantum computing. To accomplish this the team will be developing deterministic photon sources, scalable silicon photonics circuits, better connection technology and novel single-photon detectors. Key considerations for this project will be to reduce the optical losses in the system as much as possible while increasing the efficiency of the devices that generate and detect the photons. A news release about this project provided by the University of Stuttgart (in German) is available here.

February 4, 2022