On the 27th of June the BeQCI project, represented by imec, UGent and Belnet, organized an event for the press, to showcase the results achieved by the project up to this moment.
The event took place in the iGent tower, within the Zwjinaarde UGent campus in Gent, and was an outstanding occasion to spread the news about the accomplishment of the project. The event included a 30-minutes presentation, given by Karel Dumon, project manager of BeQCI, and Cedric Bruynsteen, senior researcher at IDLab, about Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), the state of the art of QKD and the project itself, including the research conducted by IDLab.
Following the presentation, the attending representatives of the press were invited by Cedric Bruynsteen and Xin Yin, professor at IDLab, to have a tour in the IDLab’s premise, where one of the two nodes of the UGent link is deployed.
The IDLab team showed the press the QKD LuxQuanta devices deployed by Belnet in their premises and the research conducted using said commercial devices about coexistence of quantum and classical signals, together with the research on the new generation of on-chip QKD devices (in featured image).
Finally, the IDLab team prepared, to better illustrate the need for QKD, a demo about how man-in-the-middle attacks with quantum computers will jeopardize classical security, by setting up the hacking of a voting system.
Following the event, which also included an official press release, several media helped spreading the news, generating a lot of interest and awareness for the BeQCI project. All the related material can be found here: