Message from the Board Chair

Welcome to Perimeter Institute’s 2024/25 Annual Report.  

Perimeter Institute has been celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2025. A quarter century ago, the idea of a research institute designed to take risks and accelerate breakthroughs in physics – right here in Canada – was little more than a dream. Today, standing atop a mountain of discoveries and new advances in knowledge, it’s no longer just a dream, and our aspirations have only gotten bigger.

One of Perimeter’s long-standing mantras is that we look to the far horizon. Our research today will pay off down the road. We might not always know its application, but we know our work will pave the way for tomorrow’s technology.  Led by this mantra, Perimeter is a hopeful place to be, and that makes it an inspiring monument to Canada’s spirit of scientific exploration. And with the UN naming 2025 as The Year of Quantum Science and Technology, the world has caught up to our way of thinking.  

With a quarter-century’s hindsight, we now have solid evidence that the model is working. We’re making progress and defining new categories of research. I’d like to highlight a few examples from our twenty-five years of breakthroughs:  

In 2013, Perimeter’s Daniel Gottesman laid the theoretical foundations for a new type of quantum error correction code, quantum LDPC codes. That effort was vindicated in 2022, when the first examples of working LDPC codes were realized. The work, done a decade ago, is paying off now.

Further back, in 2005, Perimeter researchers like Adrien Kent laid some of the foundational work behind quantum key distribution. That work has become vital to cybersecurity efforts in the quantum era.

In 2016, Perimeter researcher Roger Melko began investigating the use of machine learning for studying quantum matter. That work culminated in the successful integration of a neural network into a Rydberg atom Quantum computer. It continues to this day, in collaboration with the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing. It turns out that artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for controlling quantum computers, and by moving first in this area, Perimeter and its partners are having a lasting impact.

Our work is not bound to earthly things alone. We look to the cosmos too. In 2015, Perimeter invested in a global collaboration to take the first-ever photograph of a black hole, which took the world by storm four years later. The Event Horizon Telescope’s stunning photos remain one of the greatest scientific achievements of the century.

Perimeter’s cross-disciplinary efforts are bearing fruit too. Who would have guessed that research into astronomical objects like black holes would someday have implications for quantum technologies? Yet that’s what happened, when Beni Yoshida’s work on black hole information theory found its way into error correction techniques.

There is a new energy around quantum and Perimeter’s work that we’re seeing for the first time since our founding. I’ve experienced it firsthand in the halls of the largest technology companies, governments, and institutions on the planet. Thanks to Perimeter, Canada has the world’s attention – and an opportunity to lead in this space.  

Just this past year, Perimeter scientists published 457 papers, earned 17 prizes and honours, and hosted five major conferences and workshops. We’ve helped establish evidence that dark energy is evolving, made headways into quantum error correction, and experimented with multi-state versions of qubits known as qudits. Progress marches on and Perimeter Institute, in line with our founding vision, will lead the charge.

At twenty-five years, Perimeter Institute, its community, and its supporters all deserve to give themselves a humble pat on their backs. We’ve put in the work. And like all Canadians today, we are eyeing the future now, knowing that the challenges to come will require us to look forward together, with hope. To think big. To make connections where otherwise there might have been silos.

As you turn through the pages of this report, I hope you see what I see: the foundations of tomorrow’s technology – of tomorrow’s global reality.  

We celebrate twenty-five years of progress while remaining firmly focused on the next hundred.  

We’re ahead of the curve. Always have been. Always will be.  

And I can’t wait to see where it takes us next.