Q-SPIN

The urgency of cybersecurity to protect business viability and personal digital privacy in the emerging quantum age cannot be overstated. Encrypted data, which has traditionally provided a layer of protection, is now at risk due to the emergence of quantum computing. The potential economic losses from such attacks are staggering, estimated to be over €2 trillion, nearly five times the global cost of cybercrime in 2022. The Q-SPIN innovation emerges from deep tech research in the QUANGO and SECRET projects, which were coordinated by the University of Padova, from which ThinkQuantum is a spinoff. QUANGO developed a novel approach that increased the speed of our polarization encoding source by 20x from 50MHz to 1GHz. The source also exhibits a world record intrinsic quantum bit error rate (IQBER) of 24 hours. Q-SPIN will advance QUANGO’s results to achieve a full engineering model of the prepare and measure QKD system that includes a 2GHz source. Moreover, by exploiting the joint results from SECRET and QUANGO, Q-SPIN will also develop a high-speed source (>100MHz generation rate) of entangled photons for long-distance QKD. In the long term, this will extend the range of quantum communications and the protocol's security by enabling untrusted satellite sources. The Q-SPIN project is not just a technological innovation but also a potential game-changer in the market. We plan to perform business exploration, validate our business model, secure Q-SPIN’s IP, and establish our freedom to operate. Post-project, the technology will undergo further product development until commercialization. The successful market deployment of Q-SPIN products could lead to 32 organizations, including national health services, banks, and telecoms, adopting our solution by 2033. This would secure the patient records, financial data, communications, etc. for the estimated 43 million EU citizens these organizations will serve.