The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) and the Institut National d'Optique (INO) are pleased to announce that the 2022 CAP-INO Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Applied Photonics is awarded to Hoi-Kwong Lo, University of Toronto, in recognition of his outstanding impact on the field of Quantum communication in terms of practical implementations, laying the groundwork for commercial products for the Quantum internet. Dr Lo is a researcher of truly international caliber, with large impact at the forefront of quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution (QKD) physics.
The 2022 CAP-INO Medal is awarded to Professor Hoi-Kwong Lo of the University of Toronto in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of quantum photonics and in enabling photonics-based quantum key distribution (QKD) to advance from a somewhat implausible theoretical curiosity into demonstrably secure and readily deployable communications technology.
Hoi-Kwong Lo laid the foundation of security of quantum key distribution by proving its unconditional security, thus solving a long-standing problem. Thanks to his work, we now know for sure that QKD in principle offers information-theoretic security based on the laws of quantum physics. Information-theoretic security is the Holy Grail of secure communication. Given the growing importance of cyber-security, this is an important achievement.
Lo and co-workers not only proved the security of the decoy state technique, but also designed practical decoy state protocols to increase dramatically the secure key rate and distance of practical QKD systems. Moreover, his research group at the University of Toronto also did the world’s first experimental demonstration of decoy state QKD. Thanks to Hoi-Kwong Lo’s contributions, decoy state QKD is now a standard technique in the field and is widely deployed in commercial QKD products.
The research group of Hoi-Kwong Lo was the first to hack successfully commercial QKD systems. He and coworkers also invented an entirely new type of protocols called measurement-device-independent QKD protocol, which completely short-circuits all attacks on detectors. This work removes the Achilles’ heel of QKD, thus making practical QKD systems safe again.
Hoi-Kwong Lo also co-invented all photonics quantum repeaters and performed a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration, thus igniting the hope of the Quantum Internet. In 2019, Professor Lo co-founded a quantum start-up company, Quantum Bridge Technologies Inc. to commercialize quantum-safe security solutions.
The biennial CAP-INO Medal for Achievement in Photonics was first awarded in 1998. The 2022 medal will be the final award.
A series of virtual plenary medal talks will be organized to honour the 2022 medal recipients. The talk schedule will be posted on the CAP's website and notification of each talk will be issued once arranged. The medal will be forwarded to Hoi-Kwong Lo with the congratulations of the community.
Please see the press release here:
https://services.cap.ca/medal/publicity/press.php?year=2022&medal_id=7&num=1