Artur Konrad Ekert FRS was born on September 19, 1961. He is a professor of quantum physics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. He also serves as a professorial fellow in quantum physics and cryptography at Merton College, Oxford. Additionally, he holds the Lee Kong Chian Centennial Professor position at the National University of Singapore. Ekert is the founding director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT). His research focuses on information processing in quantum-mechanical systems, particularly in quantum communication and quantum computation. He is best known for being one of the pioneers of quantum cryptography.
Early life
Ekert was born in Wrocław and studied physics at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and at the University of Oxford. From 1987 to 1991, he was a graduate student at Wolfson College, Oxford. In his doctoral thesis, he explained how quantum entanglement and non-locality can be used to share cryptographic keys with perfect security.
Career
In 1991, he was chosen as a junior research fellow and later became a research fellow at Merton College, Oxford. At that time, he created the first research group focused on quantum cryptography and computation, located in the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford. This group later became the Centre for Quantum Computation, which is now based at DAMTP in Cambridge.
Between 1993 and 2000, he held the position of Royal Society Howe Fellow. In 1998, he was named a professor of physics at the University of Oxford and also became a fellow and physics tutor at Keble College, Oxford. From 2002 to 2006, he served as the Leigh-Trapnell Professor of Quantum Physics at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University, and was a professorial fellow at King's College, Cambridge. Since 2006, he has been a professor of quantum physics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. In 2006, he was also named a Lee Kong Chian Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore and became the founding director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT). After leaving the director role in 2020, he continues as a Distinguished Fellow at CQT. In 2020, he joined the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology as an adjunct professor.
He has worked with and advised several companies and government agencies, served on various professional advisory boards, and is the Vice Chairman of The Noel Croucher Foundation.
Research
Ekert's research covers many areas related to how information is processed in systems that use quantum mechanics, especially focusing on quantum cryptography and quantum computation. He used the concept of quantum non-locality and Bell's inequalities to create a method called entanglement-based quantum key distribution. His 1991 paper led to many new studies, creating a very active new field in physics and cryptography. This paper is among the most frequently cited in the field. The editors of the Physical Review Letters selected it as a "milestone letter," which means it made important contributions to physics, announced major discoveries, or started new research areas. His later work with John Rarity and Paul Tapster from the Defence Research Agency (DRA) in Malvern led to an experimental proof of quantum key distribution. They used techniques like parametric down-conversion, phase encoding, and quantum interferometry in cryptography. He and his collaborators were the first to create a security proof method using entanglement purification.
Ekert and his colleagues have made many contributions to both the theory of quantum computation and ideas for how to build it in practice. These include proving that almost any quantum logic gate operating on two quantum bits is universal, proposing one of the first realistic implementations of quantum computation, such as using dipole-dipole interactions in an optically driven array of quantum dots, introducing more stable geometric quantum logic gates, and proposing "noiseless encoding," which later became known as decoherence-free subspaces. His other notable contributions include work on quantum state swapping, optimal estimation of quantum states, and quantum state transfer. With some of the same collaborators, he has written about how mathematical proofs relate to the laws of physics. He has also contributed semi-popular writing on the history of science.
Honours and awards
For his work in quantum cryptography, he was awarded the 1995 Maxwell Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics, the 2007 Hughes Medal by the Royal Society, the 2019 Micius Quantum Prize, and the 2024 Royal Society Milner Award. He was also a shared winner of the 2004 European Union Descartes Prize. In 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is a member of the Singapore National Academy of Science and received the 2017 Singapore Public Administration Medal (Silver) Pingat Pentadbiran Awam. He is a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2025, he was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.