John Rarity: Quantum photonic device engineering

Prof. John Rarity

John G. Rarity is a professor of optical communication systems in the department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Bristol, and was the director of the Quantum Engineering Technology Labs (a joint Physics and E&EE Institute) and Photonics Group (E&EE). He is an international expert on quantum optics covering all aspects of optical quantum technologies exploiting single photons and entanglement.

In his early work in the 1980’s he was among the first to develop and detect non-classical light sources building early parametric sources, using home built solid state photon detectors, and making the first demonstrations of path entanglement. He turned his early, developments towards the realisation of quantum communications in the 1990’s proposing time-energy entanglement based quantum key distribution, and realising early proof of principle fibre QKD experiments. In the late 90’s he focussed on free space key distribution and he was among the first to investigate the feasibility of satellite quantum key distribution schemes.

Rarity was the Bristol PI on two quantum technology hubs: Quantum Imaging (£2.7M) and Quantum communications (£6.7M) and he was PI on many EU and EPSRC grants (> £24M) including an ERC advanced grant Quantum optics in wavelength scale structures. During his long career he received many awards and medals like the Thomas Young Medal in 1995 and most recently, in 2015, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).