With a total of 11 presentations at the 2025 editions of the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) and the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC), the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology was once again among the most visible contributors to the world’s two premier platforms for optical telecommunication and data communication research.
The team around AIT photonics and quantum experts Bernhard Schrenk and Hannes Hübel from the Center for Digital Safety & Security presented a broad portfolio of peer-reviewed papers, addressing cutting-edge topics such as 6G, quantum communication, and environmental sensing.
At ECOC 2025, which took place at the end of September, AIT achieved outstanding success with a top publication (among the top 10% of accepted contributions), which, together with another top publication and a renowned post-deadline paper at OFC, impressively underscores the institute's scientific excellence and innovation leadership in the field of optical communications.
These three top-scored contributions showcased pioneering advances in:
• a cost-effective system for distributed acousto-optic sensing, capturing faint vibrations along optical fibers by acting as a kilometer-scale “microphone”,
• a beamformer-assisted outdoor fiber-wireless-fiber bridge enabling high-capacity 6G communication resilient to environmental effects such as turbulence,
• and the world’s first all-silicon chip-scale transmitter for quantum key distribution, paving the way for compact and secure quantum communication networks.
With its contributions to ECOC and OFC, which attract up to 17,000 participants and receive up to 1,300 paper submissions per event, AIT underscores its leading role as a European technology driver in the field of photonics and quantum communication—and is actively shaping the secure, high-performance, and sustainable communications infrastructure of the future.