Centre for Quantum Computation

A chance meeting on the ski slopes of the Alps with John Rarity, a scientist at DRA (then the UK's main military research organisation), led to a collaboration in which Ekert's scheme was tested experimentally in the early 1990s.

With Deutsch, this created a small team that within a year had acquired the title of the Quantum Computation and Cryptography Group.

A breakthrough in 1994 by Peter Shor, a researcher at the labs of the American telecommunications giant AT&T, boosted the entire field of quantum information.

In 1995, Andrew Steane began an experimental effort to study how quantum computers might be built from ionised atoms trapped by laser beams.

In 1996, Jonathan Jones started a group working on a quantum computer based on the same techniques used in magnetic resonance imaging in medicine.

And two years later, Dirk Bouwmeester arrived from Geneva to begin an experimental group working out how the quantum world could also revolutionise communication.