The QuantHEP project - Quantum Computing Solutions for High-Energy Physics - led by Yasser Omar, a specialist in quantum computing, professor in the Mathematics Department at IST and coordinator of the Information Physics and Quantum Technologies Group at the Telecommunications Institute in Lisbon - was one of 12 projects selected in the QuantERA European competition, out of 85 competing projects.

"This is the seventh European project that our group has won in the last seven years, and it consolidates the position of national leadership and international prominence that the IST and the Telecommunications Institute have in the emerging domain of Quantum Technologies", said Yasser Omar.

The project of more than €600,000 involves several specialists, among them João Seixas, professor in the Physics Department of IST and President of the Center for Physics and Engineering of Advanced Materials (CeFEMA) of IST, Simone Montangero, professor at the University of Padua and Andris Ambainis, professor at the University of Latvia.

The study of the elementary particles that constitute the universe is considered by scientists as the new frontier of physics. The research consists of the "collision of subatomic particles that generate thousands of new particles, whose trajectory is measured by sensors around the point of collision". However, identifying these particles is an extremely demanding computational challenge, which even today's supercomputers have difficulty solving.

As a way of solving this obstacle, a new form of computing has been developed from CERN, 'grid computing', in which computers around the world work in networks, so that the ability to process the astronomical amounts of data produced by particle collision experiments carried out by CERN on the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is achieved.

Given the difficulties that classic supercomputers already face in the analysis of collision data of elementary particles, quantum computing, based on the laws of quantum physics, which exponentially increases the ability to calculate and process data.

Quantum computing is based on the concept of a 'qubit'- a'quantum bit', as opposed to 'bit' which is the basic unit of the binary system on which current computers are based.

According to quantum physics, unlike a classic 'bit', which is 'zero' or 'one', a 'qubit' can be in the 'zero' and 'one' states at the same time.

Currently, scientists are in an international race to develop the first operational quantum processor.