PicoQuant’s 1st International Symposium on “Single Photon-based Quantum Technologies”, held from May 30 – June 1, 2018, was considered to be a highly inspiring event by all participants. The three-day symposium brought together top researchers from various areas of quantum technologies and allowed attending scientists to report on and share their latest discoveries in single-photon detectors and sources, metrology and sensing, correlations and entanglement, communication and QKD, information processing, as well as integrated photonic quantum circuits.
Over 40 presentations reporting latest developments in these fields were held by students and renowned scientists alike. The talks were attended to and enjoyed by nearly 100 scientists from all over the world. The symposium program was rounded out by a poster session with more than 30 contributions, leading to a fruitful exchange between the participants.
Opportunities for networking and fruitful idea exchanges were provided at informal gatherings during breaks as well as at the welcoming reception. The participants especially liked that the symposium brought together researchers working on different aspects of optical quantum technologies, ranging from single photon sources and photonic networks to detectors and applications. Due to the big success of this event, PicoQuant has announced to organize another symposium in the near future.
To encourage and support young scientists, PicoQuant awarded the best talk from an undergraduate or graduate student with a prize worth 750 Euro. Many excellent contributions made it very difficult for the jury to nominate a single winner. Therefore the student award of 750 Euro was split between Naomi Holland (University of Oxford, United Kingdom) who presented her work on “Optical Tweezers for Neutral Atoms: The Key to a Reliable Atom-Photon Quantum Interface” and Ekkehart Schmidt (Karlsruhe Institute for Technology, Germany) who talked on “Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors on GaAs with suppressed parasitic counts”.
