About the Speaker

Ronald Hanson (1976) is a Distinguished Professor at Delft University of Technology and a principal investigator at QuTech. He is one of the four founding professors of QuTech (2014), serving as its Scientific Director from 2016 to 2020. Ronald was the main driving force in establishing the 7-year, € 615 million national program Quantum Delta NL, leading the team in the run-up phase and serving as the first chairman of its Executive Board (2021-2023).

Ronald’s research focuses on exploring and controlling quantum-entangled states, with the long-term goal of leveraging these in future quantum technologies, such as quantum computing and the quantum internet. His work combines quantum optics, solid-state physics, nuclear magnetic resonance, quantum information theory and nanofabrication. In 2014, his group made headlines by teleporting quantum data between electrons on distant solid-state chips. In 2015, he ended a decades-long scientific quest by performing the first loophole-free Bell test. In 2018, his group achieved a significant milestone by generating quantum entanglement faster than it would be lost. In 2021, his team realized the world’s first multi-node entanglement-based quantum network in the lab. In the coming years, he aims to build on these results to demonstrate the fundamentals of a future quantum internet on the road towards large-scale deployment.

Ronald has received several awards for his work, among which are the Nicholas Kurti European Science Prize (2012), the Huibregtsen Award for Excellence in Science and Society (2016), the John Stewart Bell Prize (2017), and the Physica Prize (2022). In 2019, he received the Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific award in the Netherlands. He was elected as a member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) and of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW), and as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2020 he was appointed as the university’s 6^th Distinguished Professor.

Distributed Quantum Computing Using A Trapped-Ion Quantum Network

About the Speaker

Professor David Lucas is an experimental atomic physicist at Oxford whose research focuses on trapped‐ion quantum computing. He leads a group working on precision control, coherence, and error reduction in ion trap qubits, pushing toward fault-tolerant quantum logic. Recently his team set a new global benchmark for single-qubit gate fidelity—achieving an error rate of just 0.000015% (one in 6.7 million) —and has demonstrated distributed quantum computation by linking remote ion processors via photonic interfaces.

About the Speaker

Seigo Tarucha received the B.E. and M.S. degrees in applied physics from the University of Tokyo in 1976 and 1978, respectively. He joined the NTT Basic Research program in applied physics at the University of Tokyo in 1986. In 1998, he moved to the University of Tokyo as a professor in the Department of Physics and then to the Department of Applied Physics in 2005. In March of 2019, he retired from the University of Tokyo, and since then, he has been fully affiliated with the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS). He has been running a Quantum Functional System Research Group in CEMS since 2013 and also a Semiconductor Quantum Information Device Research Team in RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing (RQC) since 2019. He was a guest scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute (Stuttgart) in 1986 and 1987 and at TU Delft in 1995. He is currently working on the physics and technology of spin-based quantum computing and topological quantum computing. He received the Japan IBM award in 1998, the Kubo Ryogo award, the Quantum Devices award in 1998, the Nishina award in 2002, the National medal with purple ribbon in 2004, the Leo Esaki Award in 2007, the Achievement award of Japan Applied Physics Society in 2018 and the Fujiwara Award in 2023. He is a fellow of the Japan Applied Physics Society and the IOP.