Artur Ekert

For his discovery of quantum cryptography he was awarded the 1995 Maxwell Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics, the 2007 Hughes Medal by the Royal Society and the 2019 Micius Prize (http://miciusprize.org/). He is also a co-recipient of the 2004 European Union Descartes Prize. In 2016 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is a fellow of the Singapore National Academy of Science and a recipient of the 2017 Singapore Public Administration Medal (Silver) Pingat Pentadbiran Awam.

Between 1993 and 2000 he held a position of the Royal Society Howe Fellow. In 1998 he was appointed a professor of physics at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor in physics at Keble College, Oxford. From 2002 until early 2007 he was the Leigh-Trapnell Professor of Quantum Physics at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University and a professorial fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Since 2007 he has been a professor of quantum physics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, and a Lee Kong Chian Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore.

In 1991 he was elected a junior research fellow and subsequently (1994) a research fellow at Merton College, Oxford. At the time he established the first research group in quantum cryptography and computation, based in the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford. Subsequently, it evolved into the Centre for Quantum Computation, now based at DAMTP in Cambridge.

Ekert's research extends over most aspects of information processing in quantum-mechanical systems, with a focus on quantum cryptography and quantum computation. Expanding on an early proposal of David Deutsch for using quantum non-locality and Bell's inequalities to achieve secure key distribution he analysed entanglement-based quantum key distribution in more detail in his 1991 paper which generated a spate of new research that established a vigorously active new area of physics and cryptography. It is one of the most cited papers in the field and was chosen by the editors of the Physical Review Letters as one of their "milestone letters", i.e. papers that made important contributions to physics, announced significant discoveries, or started new areas of research. His subsequent work with John Rarity and Paul Tapster, from the Defence Research Agency (DRA) in Malvern, resulted in the proof-of-principle experimental quantum key distribution, introducing parametric down-conversion, phase encoding and quantum interferometry into the repertoire of cryptography. He and collaborators were the first to develop the concept of a security proof based on entanglement purification.

Ekert studied physics at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and at the University of Oxford. Between 1987 and 1991 he was a graduate student at Wolfson College, Oxford. In his doctoral thesis he showed how quantum entanglement and non-locality can be used to distribute cryptographic keys with perfect security.

Artur Konrad Ekert FRS (born 19 September 1961 in Wrocław, Poland) is a British-Polish professor of quantum physics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, professorial fellow in quantum physics and cryptography at Merton College, Oxford, Lee Kong Chian Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore and director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT). His research interests extend over most aspects of information processing in quantum-mechanical systems, with a focus on quantum communication and quantum computation. He is best known for important contributions to the field of quantum cryptography.