Congratulations to our member Snezana Lazic on securing funding for the BLAST project (Battery-Compatible Hybrid Quantum-Light Platform for Secure Data Transmission over Telecom Links). This is a four-year, €4 million European research project funded by the European Innovation Council under its Pathfinder Open 2026 programme.
Coordinated by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), the project is led by Snezana Lazic of the Department of Materials Physics at UAM’s Faculty of Sciences. The project brings together an international consortium of research institutions and companies, including the University of St Andrews (UK), the VINČA Institute of Nuclear Sciences (Serbia), the French research organisation CNRS and its partner the Université de Technologie de Troyes, the Italian research organisation CNR and its partner the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, and the Spanish companies QARINA and ZKI.
BLAST’s main goal is to develop a new generation of compact, energy-efficient quantum light technologies that can be integrated on a chip. To achieve this, the project will combine organic semiconductors and OLED technology with inorganic quantum emitters and advanced photonic structures. A key objective is to generate and control individual photons at wavelengths compatible with existing fibre-optic telecommunications networks, thereby making secure quantum communication more practical. More broadly, the project aims to create a versatile technological platform that will move quantum light sources out of complex laboratory setups and into scalable devices. This will have future applications in quantum information processing, optical sensing, and other emerging photonic technologies. [Read more]
