For five years the UK government has been investing in quantum technologies, including photonics. The UK National Quantum Technologies Programme is set to invest £1B in its lifetime. This talk describes how the programme is pivoting from investing in university led commercialisation to funding major collaborative projects with component developers, integrators and end users.

Quantum computing is an emerging answer to the world’s data challenges but so-far have not yet achieved the 1,000s of qubits that are needed to solve useful problems. Richard will summarise the state of the art, and how ORCA Computing are looking to build quantum computers with single photons.

ALTER TECHNOLOGY TÜV NORD UK Ltd (formerly ATN UK Ltd) is a technology-oriented company active in the field of optoelectronics, microelectronics and MEMS packaging design and assembly services. Its turn-key packaging services enable its customers to reduce development and manufacturing costs, accelerate time to market and reduce risk with new product developments.

ColdQuanta leads in the commercialization of quantum atomic technologies for both laboratory and real-world applications. However, the two spaces require very different responses. Size, weight and power reduction is critical to enable many deployed systems. In these cases, ColdQuanta has focused on compact technologies. For research applications, flexibility and performance is the key and ColdQuanta targets higher performance, more versatile technologies. A third option is providing remote access to research systems and capabilities, which suggests quantum-as-a-service as a viable model. This approach minimizes many of the risks while providing unique advantages for the quantum industry.

This presentation: "Comprehensive solutions for quantum technology development: fabrication, measurement and testing qubits at scale" for the Quantum Photonics: Enabling Technologies conference, SPIE Photonex and Vacuum Expo 2020

Over the last six years, Teledyne e2v has heavily invested in transforming laboratory based quantum technologies into commercial products utilising partnerships with other industrial companies, universities and national institutes. Beyond the technical challenge of building these high performance instruments, the transition from a laboratory experiment to a sustainable and successful product can only be achieved with a reliable supply-chain, reproducible processes and a good awareness of the potential markets. This talk will highlight the experiences gained during this time using the examples of the Teledyne e2v atomic clocks and gravity sensors projects that have been funded via the UK government Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) program.

This presentation will describe the achievements and future programme of QUANTIC, the UK Quantum Technology Hub in Quantum Enhanced and Inspired Imaging. Quantic is one of four Quantum Technology Husb in the UK whose task is to translate quantum science into viable products or services. Quantic's research team, based at 8 Universities around the UK and headquartered at the University of Glasgow, is demonstrating how photon counting and timing, quantum entanglement and machine learning can tackle a range of imaging challenges in difficult media and environmental situations, and can overcome the limitations of existing imaging systems.

Protoporphyrin IX (PpIX) occurs naturally as part of the haem pathway. The photophysics of PpIX exhibits potential in photodynamic therapy, hence its study and the ability to rapidly image its localisation is important, especially in the field of fluorescence guided surgery. The use of the fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) is advantageous, but for practical purposes imaging needs to be rapid and preferably in real time. Advances in CMOS based technology has enabled widefield sensor arrays with in-pixel timing to allow for the Fluorescence Lifetime Acquisition by Simultaneous Histogramming (FLASH). Here we use PpIX in a tissue mimic construct imaged using FLASH – FLIM on a commercial widefield TCSPC camera based on a sensor chip with 192 x 128 pixels. The potential use in visualising tumour boundaries in a model system using FLIM is shown.

The presentation explores the heritage and capability of Teledyne e2v’s silicon imaging business. It looks at the important impacts the technology has made in the space sector through a variety of high profile missions. It looks at the transformation of life science microscopy with the development and maturation of EMCCD technology. It covers the emergence of high performance CMOS and its adoption for space and science applications. It gives a view of the addition of high value functionality through pre and post processing of sensing arrays. It will explore some highlights of Teledyne e2v’s prospects and a hint of what the future might hold in high performance professional imaging across the spectrum.

QLM Technology is developing a new type of low-cost gas camera based on high-speed infrared single-photon avalanche detectors or SPADS. Our first target product is a methane imager that can accurately and continuously measure industrial natural gas emissions. We are currently completing integrated and industry-ready versions for our prospective customers to evaluate in early 2021. This talk will detail our imager design and present recent performance results in leak detection and other industrial metrology applications.

Imaging though scattering or strongly diffuse media is an outstanding challenge that persists despite significant progress over the years. We will overview recent work aimed at retrieving image information from highly scattering media by using single photon sensitive cameras to record the full spatial and temporal distribution of transmitted photons, to which we then apply computational methods in order to retrieve images of embedded objects with sub-mm

Polarimeters/ellipsometers are important tools in a wide range of fields, including remote sensing, material characterisation, radar, and biomedical research. We have recently developed and demonstrated a polarimetry technique based on the total internal reflection of light in a glass cone, utilising the polarisation dependence of Fresnel reflection. This technique offers true broadband one-shot polarimetry in a compact design without moving parts. We will outline the underlying scientific principles, fidelity and efficiency, associated applications in two-photon microscopy (developed as QuantIC projects) and give an outlook on our future polarimetry development.

Post communication modulation by implementation of polarization entangled photons, or post transmission communication is a novel method by in which raw data photons is transmitted to the receiver and transmitter from an entangled photon source through two distinct polarization maintaining optical fiber. A pair of photons is generated in entangled photons source, one of twin photons e.g. |V> is sent to the transmitter and its counterpart e.g. |H> is sent to the receiver through the two links of polarization-maintaining optical fibers, having exactly the same length to guarantee reaching of photons to transmitter and receiver exactly at the same time. When one of entangled photons is ready to be polarization modulated in the transmitter, its twin photon is ready in the receiver to be read. We know the polarization of each one of twin entangled photons transmitted to receiver and transmitter, because the polarization is maintained through the fiber and by tuning and checking some photons in receiver and transmitter we can find the normal incidence polarization. When polarization of one of the photons in the transmitter is changed, this causes changing of photon counterpart in the receiver at zero-time delay. This makes zero-time communication possible ignoring transmission delay of optical fiber classical link. On the other hand, entangled photon enhancer is proposed here, because due to no-cloning theorem, it is impossible to use optical amplifier to amplify entangled photons.

Quantum imaging utilises the quantum states of light to surpass the classical limits of imaging. However, in the real-world quantum imaging schemes are subject to environmental noise and losses that destroy entanglement. Quantum illumination protocols use the spatial correlations between entangled photon-pairs to enable performance enhancements despite the presence of environmental noise and losses. We demonstrate the implementation of such a protocol whose ability to distinguish a quantum signal from environmental noise improves relative to the corresponding direct imaging case as the levels of noise and loss increase. Such quantum illumination protocols should find applications in low-light imaging and quantum LIDAR schemes.

Time-to-digital converter (TDC) is a major component for the measurement of time intervals. Recent developments in field-programmable gate array (FPGA) have enabled the opportunity to implement high performance TDC which previously was only possible in dedicated hardware. We propose a TDC with cascaded carry chains, a customized encoder, a highly efficient histogram generator. It’s implemented on a 16nm FPGA while utilizing a Gigabit Ethernet for data transmission. Comparisons with previous works show the proposed TDC has lower resource utilization whilst achieving a better raw linearity which enables the path to high performance multichannel TDCs in demanding time-of-flight (ToF) imaging application.