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Researchers based at the ANU Department of Physics have secured one of Australia’s top science prizes for developing a fast and totally secure way to transmit information using laser beams.
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Andrew Lance, Vikram Sharma and Dr Thomas Symul are part of the team that won the Eureka Prize for Scientific Research. |
The $10,000 Eureka Prize for Scientific Research was awarded to the team for its quantum cryptography breakthrough, which uses light to convey data that is impervious to hackers and eavesdroppers.
The technology developed at ANU in collaboration with theorists from the University of Queensland enables two parties, a sender and a receiver, to generate a secret electronic “key”. This key can be used by the sender to encrypt a message that only the receiver with the matching key can decrypt.
“Where traditional cryptography is based on complex mathematics, we instead use the laws of physics to guarantee communication security,” explains team leader Dr Ping Koy Lam, who also won a Eureka Prize in 2003 for his teleportation research.
The ability to guarantee information security would be of great benefit to government and the corporate sector. The researchers are currently collaborating with the Department of Defence, as well as working towards the commercialisation of their technology for other clients.
The major prize is a validation of the researchers’ achievements, which include being among the first in the world to demonstrate the transmission of a completely secret key via bright laser beams and common optics.
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