LONDON — The U.K. government’s main science funding agency, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPRSC), has awarded the University of Cambridge a £4.4 million (about $7.8 million) research grant to investigate nanostructures. The hope is that the research will revolutionize semiconductor and information technology and help discover new laws of physics.

The University’s Department of Physics Cavendish Laboratory wants to develop semiconductor devices for “quantum computing”; able to communicate faster than the current generation.

Professor Sir Michael Pepper, who has been appointed to lead the four-year project and is head of the Semiconductor Physics Group at the Cavendish, said: “We are not talking about speeding up reactions by a factor of two or three, but by a factor of billions! Currently computing operations happen in sequence. With the new technology they will happen in parallel.”

Other investigators in the Cavendish Laboratory team include Professor David Ritchie, Professor Charles Smith, Dr Crispin Barnes, Dr Chris Ford, Dr Geb Jones, and Dr Kalaricad Thomas, who are joined by Professor Michael Kelly in the Department of Engineering.

“The main applications for the new quantum computers will initially be enormous databases and security,” said Professor Pepper. “Beyond that, quantum technology will impact on everyone’s lives, but we are not yet sure how. This work will bring about a fusion of technology with the most fundamental theory of nature — the laws of quantum mechanics. We anticipate finding new types of behavior in physics when dimensions become extremely small.”

“It is hard to say just what the full implications of this work are, in a way that we did not understand the full impact of computers when scientists in Cambridge first worked on them in the 1940s. I hope that the research will contribute to new industries yet to be born.”

During the 1990s the Cavendish Laboratory was a pioneer of single-electron devices that were expected to take the current generation of semiconductor devices architectures to their ultimate conclusion with information processed by the behavior of single electrons. However, single-electron devices have yet to prove commercially useful.