The RAGC and the
Barrié Foundation awards the VQCC.

The Royal Galician Academy of Sciences and the Barrié Foundation have just made public the winning proposals for the “Barrié Foundation-RAGC Research Awards” which they jointly convene with the aim of recognizing the best research carried out in Galicia in Basic, Technical and Social Sciences.

The award for the best research carried out in Galicia in Technical Sciences went to an article leaded by Víctor Zapatero, the work being coordinated by Prof. Marcos Curty, both from Quantum Communication Theory Group at the Vigo Quantum Communication Center. Endowed with €5000 each, the awards ceremony will be next Wednesday the 5th at the Pazo de San Roque in Santiago, coinciding with the opening of the RAGC academic year.

Secure Galician technology for future satellite communications.

Víctor Zapatero indicates that governments and institutions around the world are replacing their conventional encryption with more robust encryption due to the threat of quantum computers. In this transition, a technique known as “quantum key distribution” is presented as the only solution that allows unconditional security to be achieved, but it is the most expensive to implement and, furthermore, if it is not implemented correctly, its security guarantees disappear.

This “practical fragility”, coupled with its high cost, is holding back the widespread adoption of quantum key distribution. In this context, the award-winning work proposes a new variant that is simpler, cheaper and more practical. This variant has already been tested in real experiments and is believed to have a leading role in future quantum satellite communications.