Prof. Dan Browne — UCL Physics

I am a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCL, where I am a member of the Atomic, Molecular, Optical and Positron Physics (AMOPP) group. My research focuses on quantum computing theory, with particular interests in quantum error correction, fault-tolerant quantum computing, and measurement-based quantum computation. I am Editor in Chief of npj Quantum Information, Co-director of the EPSRC CDT in Quantum Computation and Quantum Communications, and a strategic advisor to Riverlane.

I completed my undergraduate degree (MSci Physics) at Imperial College London in 2000, spending my third year in Freiburg-im-Breisgau working with Prof. Christoph Keitel. I then held a DAAD Research Scholarship at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, where I first began working on quantum computation under the supervision of Prof. Hans Briegel. I completed my PhD at Imperial College London in 2004 under Prof. Martin Plenio, followed by a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford (2004–2007). I joined UCL in 2007, where I have been a Lecturer, Reader, and since 2017, Professor of Physics.

Research

Quantum computers promise to solve problems that are beyond the reach of any classical machine — but only if we can protect fragile quantum information from the noise that inevitably corrupts it. Quantum error correction is the theory of how to do this: by encoding information redundantly across many physical qubits, errors can be detected and corrected without disturbing the underlying computation. The group's research focuses on developing and analysing quantum error-correcting codes and the fault-tolerant architectures built on top of them, including scalable decoding algorithms suited to near-term hardware. This work connects to broader questions about the resources that make quantum computing powerful — measurement-based quantum computation, magic states, and contextuality. We also develop architectures for physical quantum computing platforms, such as linear optical quantum computation, exploring how photonic systems can be harnessed for quantum information processing.

📚 Publications on Google Scholar