Institute for Quantum Computing

Congratulations to IQC students and outreach volunteers Caroline Lima, PhD candidate, Physics and Astronomy, and Ireneo James Membrere, master’s student, Applied Mathematics, on receiving the 2026 David Johnston Outreach Award.

Their outstanding contributions help promote public awareness of quantum information research and general science to scientific and local communities.

The award was created in honour of David Johnston, University of Waterloo’s president from 1999 to 2010, for his vital contributions to IQC.

The Institute for Quantum Computing hosted its first Youth Quantum Symposium earlier this year, connecting keen minds with researchers and fostering their interest in quantum information science.

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Five IQC faculty have received grants totalling more than $300,000 through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)  Discovery Grants program. The grants will help advance theoretical and applied research of professors in Faculties of Engineering, Science and Mathematics.
 
The funding awarded to IQC faculty is part of a larger NSERC funding allocation to over 100 University of Waterloo researchers across multiple disciplines.

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The time is now to apply responsible quantum innovation. 

Inspired by the late Dr. Ray Laflamme, founding executive director of IQC, a group of young quantum researchers are looking beyond how quantum science and technology will impact society. They are asking: “How will it be used responsibly?” 

Katya Driscoll, Ria Chakraborty, Bruna Shinohara de Mendonça and Rodolfo Reis Soldati looked at different quantum strategies globally and measured how Canada compares within the context of a responsible quantum innovation framework, which was co-developed by Laflamme. They identified gaps and strengths in Canada’s National Quantum Strategy and proposed ways to fill those gaps.

The group’s paper on the topic was recently published in Physics in Canada, the magazine of the Canadian Association of Physicists.

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IQC Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Devashish Tupkary presented new work for the first time at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and IQC Quantum Safe Cryptography Conference 2026.
 
Tupkary recently graduated from University of Waterloo with a PhD in Physics, Quantum Information. The work he presented comes from an IQC research group that included Shlok Nahar, Amir Arqand, Ernest Y.-Z. Tan, all of whom were supervised by Dr. Norbert Lütkenhaus, Executive Director of IQC and Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy.
 
The research fills a critical gap pointed out in a previous review of security proofs of the practical decoy-state BB84 Quantum Key Distribution protocol. It presents a new, modular, rigorous, and widely applicable proof to more easily verify security of a broad class of practical QKD protocols.

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IQC congratulates the 22 graduates who received their degrees from the Faculties of Engineering, Mathematics and Science at Spring Convocation 2026.

IQC graduate students are a key part of how the Institute advances fundamental and applied research through the collective strength of seven University of Waterloo departments, underpinning tomorrow’s quantum technologies.

The 2026 Undergraduate School for Experimental Quantum Information Processing (USEQIP) class is starting week two of our annual program that gives undergraduate students insights into the theoretical and experimental study of quantum information.

This year, IQC welcomes 30 students joining us from universities across Canada, the U.S. and internationally.

During the first week, the students toured the Quantum-Nano Fabrication and Characterization Facility and other labs, and started working closely with their classmates and instructors. By the end of the two weeks, the students will have attended lectures introducing quantum information theory and experimental approaches to quantum devices, followed by more than 30 hours of hands-on exploration of Quantum Information Processing (QIP) using the experimental facilities at the institute. 

IQC has hosted the competitive USEQIP program since 2009. The program is supported by the Mitacs Globalink Internship (GRI) program and the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) as part of the Transformative Quantum Technologies research initiative.

Researchers at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo report a new nanoscale diamond structure that better collects and controls light, published in Science Advances.

The novel device produces a ‘nanojet’ of light and shows promise for advancing scalable quantum technologies, including the potential to make quantum sensors better at detecting weak magnetic fields, which could enhance technologies in biomedical imaging or navigation in GPS-denied environments. It could also advance solid-state quantum computing architectures by improving control and readout of individual quantum bits (qubits), and the transfer of quantum information between them.

The work was done by Dr. Michal Bajcsy, IQC Faculty and Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and his group of post docs and graduate students at the Institute.

QuantumCore, a new startup spun out of research at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo, is accelerating its push toward commercialization with $10.7 million in dilutive and non-dilutive funding and a public listing after launching just more than six months ago.
 
The company was founded by IQC faculty Dr. Christopher Wilson, Chief Technology Officer and Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Eugene Profis, CEO.
 
It is developing an amplifier that boosts read-out signals produced by a superconducting quantum chip at near absolute zero temperatures and gets the signal into room temperature. This could solve one of the many hard engineering challenges in quantum computing.

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