We are very sad to inform the quantum community that professor Roman Stanisław Ingarden, famous Polish physicist, passed away on the 12th of July 2011. Before his death he worked as professor emeritus at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. His scientific achievements have been recognised worldwide. In 1976 he published the paper 'Quantum Information Theory' which is, most probably, the first documented case of using the term 'quantum information theory'.

Carbon as a razor-thin transparent foil is one of the innovations presented by the "Munich-Centre of Advanced Photonics" (MAP) at the "LASER – World of Photonics" on May 23-26 in Munich. High-power lasers knock out pulsed ion beams out of these foils, which will be used as a low-cost and gentle alternative for cancer therapy in a few years. At the joint booth of the Bavarian Universities (B2.407) MAP and the future "Centre for Advanced Laser Applications" (CALA) present how cancer diagnostics and therapy benefit from the new lasers.

Hamish Johnston writes at PhysicsWorld: ''A small firm based in Canada that aims to build a commercially viable quantum computer has shown that an important part of its technology works. D-Wave Systems, which was spun-out of the University of British Columbia in 1999, has shown that a technique called quantum annealing can be used to make eight coupled quantum bits – or qubits – find their ground state.

ID Quantique SA announced the successful completion of the longest running project for testing Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) in a field environment. The main goal of the SwissQuantum network, installed in the Geneva metropolitan area in March 2009, was to validate the reliability and robustness of QKD in continuous operation over a long time period in a field environment. The quantum layer ran stably for nearly 2 years until the completion of the project in January 2011, confirming the viability of QKD as a commercial encryption technology.