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7th hottest research front

Posted on 16 November 2017

Research by Professors Stefano Pirandola and Sam Braunstein, from the Department of Computer Science, has been cited as the 7th hottest research front in mathematics, computer science and engineering.

In a report generated by Clarivate Analytics (formerly the IP and Science business of Thomson Reuters), their research into measurement-device-independent quantum cryptography is an emerging specialty area. Administrators, policy makers and others who need to monitor, support and advance research in the face of finite resources, are guided by these research fronts as to where they can watch science unfold.

According to "Research Fronts 2016", which identifies 100 hot research fronts and 80 emerging ones, "the research fronts data provides an ongoing chronicle of how discrete fields of activity emerge, coalesce, grow (or, possibly, shrink and dissipate), and branch off from one another as they self-organize into even newer nodes of activity."

The team at the University of York, which includes Carlo Ottaviani, produced three of the core papers in this area, including one of the original founding papers in 2012 (published in Physical Review Letters) and later papers in 2015.

Professor Pirandola said: "I am glad to see how this area has evolved so much in just a few years. The original idea was to make quantum key distribution immune from so-called "side-channel attacks" which are the Achille's heel of this field.  In 2012, Sam Braunstein and I came up with this new protocol [1], robust to these attacks, and making the first step towards a truly end-to-end architecture for a secure quantum network (an architecture where the middle relays may be unreliable). In 2015, we extended this protocol to high-rate version [2] suitable for metropolitan implementations."

Professor Braunstein said: "It's good to see elegant principles making a strong impact on the community. When our work [1] is eventually implemented in full it will close all the loopholes in security to even
the most sophisticated external attacks."