Quantum Technologies mark their place at MWC2022

The European Quantum Flagship hosts the European Quantum Space in the 4YFN Hall 6 to showcase the recent advances attained in quantum technologies and how these are becoming tangible products and services for the telecommunications market.

The world is moving at full speed, pushing forward an amazing wave of novel and disruptive technologies that will change the way we see, move, behave and even communicate. We are at a point in time where those technologies, eager to emerge, will signify a paradigm shift in how we view our place in this world, opening a whole new realm to our understanding of the human being from the inside and out: how it interacts and connects with its environment and other elements.

This year, from February 28^th to March 3^rd, the Mobile World Congress 2022 (MWC) will host The European Quantum Space, a zone dedicated to showcasing the innovation and development in Quantum Technologies that Europe is driving forward. Curated by ICFO, the space aims to showcase the latest achievements and advances in the field of quantum technologies, mainly focusing on quantum communication and computing, two of the areas of major interest within the field. The space, arranged in an area of 70m2, will be located in the 4 Years from Now Hall (4YFN) and staged to host three main areas: The Quantum Flagship, Regional Initiatives and Start-ups/Companies.

What to see

Launched at the end of 2018, the Quantum Flagship made its official presentation at the MWC in 2019. Then the pandemic caused a momentarily halt in the middle, especially in regards to having a stand in the event, but now the initiative is back to showcase and exhibit some of the results the initiative has achieved in its first 3 years.

Attendees to the congress will be able to learn about the European initiative, the scientific projects that have been part of the program during this first phase as well as two of Europe’s regional initiatives, the Quantum Valley Lower Saxony, from Germany, and QuantumCAT, from Catalonia, which are gathering synergies to push forward the programs of quantum technologies in their respective regions. Finally, the space will also include the presence of five quantum communication and computing companies, who will bring to the floor the products and services they have developed, that could be of major interest to the telecommunication audience, core to the mobile ecosystem that the MWC brings together.

The participating companies are the Finnish IQM focused on building on-premises quantum computers for supercomputing centres, industry, and national research centres; Qblox, a start-up from the Netherlands that develops scalable qubit control stack technology for quantum computers; the Spanish Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech, which provides quantum computing to accelerate its widespread availability for everyone, and ICFO spin-offs LuxQuanta, focused on quantum-safe cryptography, and Quside, that develops high-quality and measurable randomness devices at scale.

Invited Quantum Speakers

On behalf of the Quantum Flagship, Jaya Baloo, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Avast Software and Vice-Chair of the Quantum Flagship Strategic Advisory Board, has been invited to participate in the discussion panel “5G Security: A New Threat Landscape”, which will take place Monday 28th at the MWC Broadcast Stage in Hall 4.

On Tuesday, March 1^st from 17:20 - 18:00h, Vanesa Diaz, Business Development Director at LuxQuanta will be participating in the session Frontier Tech Programme (III): Quantum Technologies, and Carlos Abellán, CEO & co-founder of Quside, CiViQ project partner will be participating in the networking session and exhibition “miXer”. Both start-ups are members of the European quantum industry consortium QuIC.

Quantum technologies are slowly unfolding, so that sooner or later, in some way or format, these techs will become part of our daily lives. It might, or not, take longer than expect and hoped for, but quantum technologies are showing the potential to become a game-changer in the future of our society and MWC aims to be one of the featured scenarios where the Quantum Flagship seeks to showcase the tangible and technologically mature discoveries to trailblazing technological companies that seem very eager to become end-users of this technology.