Event Horizon

The Australian National University

Event Horizon

Research School of Physics

Weekly newsletter | vol 51 no 32 | 17–21 August 2026

Director's Message

Dear Colleagues,

Last week was a very quantum-y week around the School. On Wednesday afternoon we hosted a Japanese quantum technologies delegation visiting Canberra through the DFAT Canberra Fellowship Program, with senior officials from Japan's Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, METI and MEXT, along with the Embassy of Japan and colleagues from DFAT. My thanks to Hoe Tan, Steve Madden, Andrew Truscott, Matt Sellars and Sophie Zhao for showing our visitors around, and to Jaret Lee and Claudia Nicoletti, the Quantum Australia team here at the ACT node, for organising the visit.

Then on Thursday evening the ACT node of Quantum Australia was officially launched at the Quantum Australia Showcase in the Mural Hall at Parliament House. The evening featured pitches from six start-ups in the NextQ cohort and a busy hour or so of booths and conversation afterwards. It was a good opportunity to reflect on how much of Australia's quantum industry has its roots in this School, from QuintessenceLabs in 2008 through to Quantum Brilliance, and on the two decades of graduates who have gone on to work in those companies and others here and overseas.

This week's research highlight suitably has a quantum flavour. Mayank Joshi, a PhD student in the Department of Quantum Science and Technology, has a new paper in Nano Letters from work carried out during his research placement at A*STAR. The paper reports a source of entangled photon pairs made from the van der Waals ferroelectric NbOI2. Materials of this kind are attractive for compact quantum light sources, but they tend to degrade in air and under sustained pumping. By encapsulating the crystal in graphene, the team produced a bright and stable photon-pair source with polarisation entanglement measured at 94% fidelity. They have since gone a step further and integrated the material directly onto the facet of an optical fibre, giving an ultracompact and alignment-free source with exceptionally clean quantum correlations. Together these are a promising step towards robust fibre-integrated sources for quantum communication, sensing and computing. Congratulations Mayank and the whole team.

Save the date for Physics Project Market Day, which will be held on Thursday 24 September from 11:30am to 2:00pm in B160. This is always a great chance for undergraduate students to talk directly with staff and PhD students about the research projects on offer. Thanks as always to A/Prof Cormac Corr for organising the day. We are widening the scope a little this year, with career journey talks from some of our alumni to illustrate the paths that research in physics can lead you on, and with companies joining us from our Momentum Innovation Space and further afield. Academic staff should keep an eye out for details about updating their projects and booking a poster board. More information can be found here.

Finally, thank you to all those who volunteered to help run the Physics activities at the ANU 80th Celebration on Saturday. By all reports it was a great success.

Jodie

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