Thomas Jennewein

Thomas Jennewein is an Austrian physicist who conducts research in quantum communication and quantum key distribution. He has taught as an associate professor at the University of Waterloo and the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Canada since 2009.

He is also an affiliate of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research,

Education and earlier work Thomas Jennewein obtained an engineering degree in physics from HTL Anichstraße in 1991, his master's degree in experimental physics from the University of Innsbruck in 1997, and earned his doctoral degree at the University of Vienna in 2002. He is currently "working with partners in industry and academia to advance a proposed microsatellite mission called QEYSSat through a series of technical studies funded initially by Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) and subsequently by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA)." In April 2017, the Canadian government announced funding of $80.9 million to the Canadian Space Agency for funding of two projects, one of which is for the "demonstration of the applications of quantum technology in space" with the goal of positioning "Canada as a leader in quantum encryption".

In December 2015, Jennewein, with researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology among others, closed two loopholes (namely, the locality and detection loopholes) in a Bell test experiment by using entangled photons to obtain a Bell inequality violation by seven standard deviations. The experiment later received one of the ten Physics World 2017 Breakthrough of the Year awards.

In June 2017, Jennewein and his colleagues published findings that showed the first demonstration of quantum key distribution from a ground transmitter to a "receiver prototype mounted on an airplane in flight", reporting optical links with distances between 3-10km and the generation of secure keys up to 868 kilobytes in length.