on 04-04-2022
IT was a key part of my development as a researcher.
I joined the Optical Communication Group of IT, at the time led by José Ferreira da Rocha, in 1994, still at an early stage of the institution. Since then, IT has provided me with a very stimulating environment.
Since 2005, we started working on quantum communications. We began to explore the quantum nature of light to implement systems that do things that classical systems cannot do or that can do the same things more efficiently.
Our first quantum work was published in 2006 at a conference on Oporto.
In 2006, we were able to generate and detect single photons. In 2011, we implemented a quantum communication system with polarization coding in IT Aveiro laboratories.
In 2012, we were able to generate entangled photon pairs using spontaneous four waves mixing in a highly nonlinear optical fiber.
Since then, we have been using single and entangled photon pairs to implement new quantum protocols. We have also established a very fruitful collaboration with the theoretical group of Paulo Mateus, from IT Lisbon, who has been developing new quantum protocols and some of which we have been implementing in our laboratory and outside of it.
Indeed, in 2021, we installed a secure quantum link between the Air Force Command and the General Headquarters of the Armed Forces, in collaboration with the Portuguese Defense.
In 2022, we implemented in the Quantum Madrid Network a secure quantum multiparty computing service to support genomic medicine. This has indeed been quite a long journey, but it has not been a solitary journey, I have been accompanied by some very talented students, by several brilliant colleagues from IT and from other national and international research institutions.
There are so many colleagues that deserve credits that I cannot list all of them here. However, in this journey, there are two talented researchers who built with me the IT Quantum Optical Communication Group and to whom I have to thank, Nelson Muga and Nuno Silva. They certainly deserve as much credit as I do for all of our successes over the years.
To finalize, I would like to thank all of you that make IT every day and would like to celebrate the 30 years of IT!
Let’s make the next 30 years even more remarkable because communicating is as crucial now as it was 30 years ago!
Armando Pinto (IT Aveiro)