Sapienza has been awarded funding for an ERC-PoC project, which is part of the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and is reserved for researchers who have previously been funded by the European Research Council and who wish to explore the commercial or social potential of their research. Among the 15 Italian winners this year (the first country at European level in terms of the number of projects awarded) is the Poqub project, coordinated by Fabio Sciarrino, a lecturer at the Department of Physics.

The Poqub project will develop quantum algorithms for generating and manipulating random variables, known in the literature as Quantum Bernoulli Factories. A Bernoulli factory is a routine that processes random Bernoulli variables, such as the outcome of a coin toss, and generates new ones whose bias is a function of the input variables. Recently proposed 'quantum-to-quantum' Bernoulli Factory schemes encode both the algorithm's input and output variables in the amplitudes of two-level quantum states such as qubits, the fundamental logical units of quantum information.

The potential applications of this routine are manifold. Indeed, it could be used as a key ingredient in the development of future quantum communication networks, both to ensure their efficiency and security, and as a function for more complex quantum algorithms, extending current approaches to random variable generation and manipulation. An open challenge is to design an approach for implementing a quantum-to-quantum Bernoulli factory that is as general and cost-effective as possible.

More information on the Italian version of this page.