The Chancellor George Osborne has announced £270m of new investment in quantum technologies. The new funding was announced at a meeting with top physicists, including UCL Quantum’s Prof Andrew Fisher.

This forms part of a package of public spending announcements in his Autumn Statement, and will cover five research centres at UK universities.

Prof Michael Arthur, President & Provost of UCL said:

This announcement is excellent news for the field of quantum technology, and will help put the UK at the forefront of the emerging quantum technology industry. UCL is one of the UK’s leading research centres in this field, and well placed to help realise this vision.”

• Read more about the announcement and the meeting in the Financial Times

Around 100 participants have come to a conference at UCL Quantum, supported by the French Embassy’s Science and Technology Department.

The event featured a public lecture by renowned quantum computing expert Peter Shor (pictured above) on the subject of error correction in quantum computing.

Other speakers included:

• Matthias Christandl (ETH)
• Nilanjana Datta (University of Cambridge)
• Eleni Diamanti (Télécom ParisTech)
• Dan Browne (UCL)
• Iordanis Kerenidis (UniversitéParis Diderot)
• Damian Markham (Télécom ParisTech)
• Lluis Masanes (University of Cambridge)
• Jess Riedel (IBM)
• Terry Rudolph (Imperial College London)
• Thomas Vidick (Isaac Newton Institute)
• Reinhard Werner (Leibniz Universität Hannover)
• Andreas Winter (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Local organizers:

• Fernando Brandao
• Jonathan Oppenheim
• Simone Severini