I’m recruiting a PhD student. The funded opportunity is open to both UK (home) and international applicants, wishing to study on a full-time, on campus basis only.
This ambitious project aims to contribute to the development of large-scale quantum communication infrastructure by identifying viable pathways for practical deployment of secure quantum networks. It investigates optical quantum repeaters for long-distance secure quantum key distribution (QKD). The PhD candidate will develop theoretical frameworks to analyse repeater architectures, evaluating both amplifier-enhanced and memory-assisted protocols. Crucially, you will develop experiment-ready models that rigorously account for realistic device imperfections—bridging the gap between theory and practical implementation.

Funding.
Both Home and International students can apply. Only home tuition fees will be covered for the duration of the 3.5-year award, which is £5,006 for the year 2025/26. Eligible international students will need to make up the difference in tuition fee funding (Band 2 for the year 2025/26). The student will receive a standard stipend payment for the duration of the award. These payments are set at a level determined by the UKRI, currently £20,780 for the academic year 2025/26.

Specific requirements of the candidate.
• First or upper second class (2:1) honours degree from a UK university or an equivalent qualification (or be close to completing) in Physics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related discipline.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, and the ability to work independently and collaboratively.
• Strong analytical skills and motivation for independent research are essential.
• Knowledge of optics and communications is desirable.
• Knowledge of quantum optics and quantum communications is desirable.
• Familiarity with programming (MATLAB, Python, etc.) is desirable.

How to apply.
Interested applicants should contact Dr Masoud Ghalaii (m.ghalaii@mmu.ac.uk) for an informal discussion.

To formally apply you will need to complete the online application form for a full time PhD in Computing & Digital Technology

Also, please complete the Doctoral Project Applicant Form, and include your CV and a covering letter to demonstrate how your skills and experience map to the aims and objectives of the project, the area of research and why you see this area as being of importance and interest. Please upload these documents in the supporting documents section of the University’s Admissions Portal.

Closing time.
27th February 2026

IBM releases first-ever 1,000-qubit quantum chip by announcing its latest huge chip (called Condor) — but will now focus on developing smaller chips with a fresh approach to ‘error correction’.

Today, I am joining Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) as its newest Lecturer, contributing to its research and teaching as it enters its 201st year!

Our recent paper, published in PRX Quantum, gives a boost to quantum-safe communications via satellite. Find the coverage news on the UK QComm Hub and Singapore CQT pages. The paper is open access for all readers on
https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.4.040320

“The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature.” A study in Nature reports.

Philippe Grangier explains a simple illustration:
“With the Nobel Prize attributed to Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger, the international scientific community acknowledged the fundamental importance of the experimental violation of Bell’s inequalities. It is however still debated what fails in Bell’s hypotheses, leading to these inequalities, and usually summarized as “local realism”, or maybe more appropriately “classical local realism”. The most common explanation is “quantum non-locality”, that remains however fully compatible with relativistic causality; this makes wondering whether any non-local phenomenon is really involved in these experiments. Here we want to recapitulate another option, sometimes called “predictive incompleteness”, closely related to the idea that the usual state vector ψ is incomplete indeed, as it was claimed by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen. However, the right way to complete ψ has nothing to do with hidden variables, but requires to specify the measurement context, as it was claimed by Bohr. Here we will consider the simple case of two spin 1/2, or two qubits, in order to keep the argument simple, but it does apply generally in quantum mechanics.” See full paper on the arXiv.

An interesting proposal by M. Malik & R. Boyd who submitted to CLEO-2012. See here.

R. Renner & R. Wolf discuss this in their paper.
“Ever since its inception, cryptography has been caught in a vicious circle: Cryptographers keep inventing methods to hide information, and cryptanalysts break them, prompting cryptographers to invent even more sophisticated encryption schemes, and so on. But could it be that quantum information technology breaks this circle? At first sight, it looks as if it just lifts the competition between cryptographers and cryptanalysts to the next level. Indeed, quantum computers will render most of today’s public key cryptosystems insecure. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to believe that cryptographers will ultimately prevail over cryptanalysts. Quantum cryptography allows us to build communication schemes whose secrecy relies only on the laws of physics as well as some minimum assumptions about the cryptographic hardware – leaving basically no room for an attack. While we are not yet there, this article provides an overview of the principles and state of the art of quantum cryptography.”

Use Quantum Flytrap to visualise quantum optics experiments. You can follow a guide on the arXiv.