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Quantum sensors to make Australia safer

Wednesday, 10 April 2019

One hundred years ago, a new science, Quantum Mechanics, had to be devised to try to explain unexplainable phenomena that had been discovered in the microscopic world. Quantum Mechanics has been blowing our minds ever since: predicting, for example, that one object can be in two different locations at the same time or giving rise to paradoxes such as Schrödinger’s famous cat. Yet, despite being fundamentally counter-intuitive, every test of Quantum Mechanics has since shown it to be exactly correct in every prediction it makes.

Now, almost 100 years later, Australia’s Department of Defence, through its Next Generation Technologies Fund, has selected 11 projects that exploit the extraordinary properties of quantum mechanics to deliver improved security for Australians. The Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS) at the University of ÐÂÀ˲ÊƱ is involved in four of these ambitious projects.

IPAS will wor