Nine UBC-led research projects to advance quantum innovation

January 21, 2025

Sherry Romanado, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the King’s Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Emergency Preparedness and Member of Parliament for Longueuil-Charles-LeMoyne, on behalf of the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, announced over $74 million in funding to support 107 quantum science projects. 

The awarded projects aim to address important challenges in quantum science, while supporting the development of quantum technologies in a variety of priority areas aligned with the three missions of Canada’s National Quantum Strategy. This includes quantum algorithms and encryption, quantum communications, quantum computing, quantum materials and quantum sensing. The projects will enhance Canada’s quantum capabilities through domestic partnerships between universities and organizations from the private, public and not-for-profit sectors, including large-scale collaborations across Canada’s regional quantum research and innovation hubs. This investment will also help Canadian researchers establish and grow international research collaborations, including through targeted joint initiatives with France’s Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR) and the US National Science Foundation.

The awarded projects are supported through the following NSERC funding opportunities:

  • Alliance Quantum grants – over $50 million awarded to 39 projects;
  • Alliance Consortia Quantum grants – close to $20 million awarded to four projects;
  • Alliance International Catalyst Quantum grants and Alliance International Collaboration Quantum grants – over $4 million awarded to 64 projects.

Read the announcement

Nine projects led by UBC researchers were awarded $7.2 million.

UBC-led Projects

  • Time-resolved Higgs spectroscopy in high-temperature superconductors
    UBC PI: Andrea Damascelli (Physics & Astronomy)
     
  • Qutrit compilation strategies toward practical quantum simulations of lattice gauge theories
    UBC PI: Olivia Di Matteo (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
     
  • Emergent Quantum Phenomena in Bulk Heterostructures
    UBC PI: Alannah Hallas (Physics & Astronomy)
     
  • Machine-learning models for 2D quantum materials
    UBC PI: Christoph Ortner (Mathematics)
     
  • Hybrid Integrated Quantum Light Sources
    UBC PI: Lukas Chrostowski (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
     
  • High-temperature single-photon detectors for photonic quantum computing
    UBC PI: Andrea Damascelli (Physics & Astronomy)
     
  • Lattice-Based Quantum Error-Correcting Codes for Photonic Quantum Computing
    UBC PI: Chen Feng (School of Engineering - UBC Okanagan) 
    Read more
     
  • Large-Scale Quantum Simulations for Organic Semiconductor Design
    UBC PI: Zachary Hudson (Chemistry)
     
  • Quantum "rotonics": the study of laser-induced ultrafast dynamics of rotons in superfluid helium for terahertz sensing and imaging
    UBC PI: Valery Milner (Physics & Astronomy)

     

 


First Nations land acknowledegement

We acknowledge that UBC’s two main campuses are situated within the ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam people, and in the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation and their peoples.



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