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Professor Hoi-Kwong Lo has been awarded the 2023 IEEE Photonics Society Quantum Electronics Award

For the past 45 years, the IEEE honours a team or individual for their “outstanding technical contributions to quantum electronics, either in fundamentals, applications, or in both”. This year, Professor Lo received this award for his work in quantum cryptography and quantum network.
Hoi-Kwong Lo

This story was originally published on the U of T Physics website.

The IEEE Photonics Society Quantum Electronics Award was created to recognize outstanding technical contributions to quantum electronics, either in fundamentals, applications, or in both. The award recognizes seminal or fundamental contributions in important field.

Professor Lo has been honoured with this achievement for establishing the theoretical and experimental foundation for practical quantum cryptography and quantum network.

Professor Lo is a pioneer in the field of quantum information and quantum cryptography and was among the first in the world to establish three fundamental results:

  1. to prove the information-theoretic security of QKD,
  2. to co-invent quantum secret sharing, and
  3. to prove the impossibility of quantum bit commitment.

His research group at the University of Toronto was the first in the world to implement experimentally the decoy state QKD protocol in 2005 and successfully hack commercial QKD systems (around 2008-2010). In 2012, he co-invented the novel protocol measurement-device-independent (MQI-QKD), which is widely regarded as a breakthrough in the field. Recently, his research group and collaborators invented and experimentally implemented a proof-of-principle demonstration of all photonics quantum repeaters and experimentally implemented the novel twin-field QKD protocol.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), an Optica Fellow (OSA), and has been awarded the 2022 CAP-INO Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Applied Photonics.

More information here: Quantum Electronics Award - IEEE Photonics Society