Sarah Beavan

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Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship in Technology and Communications sponsored by Telstra

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“In the age of the internet our society relies heavily on encryption to ensure confidentiality, reliability and authenticity of digital communications. The systems in use today depend on the computational difficulty of performing some algorithms. While it is unlikely that this encryption will be broken, it can not be proven to be secure.”

Sarah Beavan has received the 2008 Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship in Technology and Communication sponsored by Telstra, the major provider of communications services in Australia. The Scholarship, announced by Telstra in May 2004, aims to nurture the next generation of technology and communication professionals ‘… whose ideas and leadership will shape the future of our world’.

A graduate from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) with a Bachelors of Applied Science with First Class Honours and the University Medal, Sarah is now undertaking a PhD in physics at the Australian National University (ANU) through an Australian Postgraduate Award and College of Science Distinguished Research Student Scholarship.

Through her Fulbright Sarah will undertake research at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland. “The U.S. and Australia are both at the forefront of quantum mechanics research, although the U.S. has the resources and capability to explore a much broader range of quantum phenomena,” explains Sarah.

“Quantum cryptography is a very popular research topic that will affect many aspects of society when implemented, and is an especially attractive prospect to organisations with high security requirements, such as government defence agencies, financial institutions and telecom carriers. The main impediment of such quantum systems is that information is lost exponentially as the distance between the sender and receiver is increased.”

“A so called ‘quantum repeater’ would be the solution to this limited range problem, and would form an essential component of any future quantum networks. My project’s aim is to demonstrate a quantum repeater at the JQI in Maryland and by incorporating the solid-state quantum memory that is being researched here in our laboratories at the ANU, it is expected that this repeater setup will be more reliable and robust than currently achieved.”

During her studies at QUT Sarah was recognised with a wide range of awards including the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Honours, Head of School’s Award for Excellence in Mathematics, and the Physics Staff Prize, culminating in her winning the University Medal for Science.