China, the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and Finland are among the leading countries in quantum computing development, each making substantial investments and achieving notable milestones.

China has invested approximately $15 billion in public funds for quantum research, unveiled a 504-qubit chip, and delivered its first practical quantum computer system, the 24-qubit Wuyan system, making it the third country after Canada and the U.S.

to deliver a complete quantum computer system to a customer .

China’s Jiuzhang 3.0 quantum computer prototype, using 255 detected photons, can solve Gaussian boson sampling problems 10 quadrillion times faster than the fastest supercomputers .

government committed $1.8 billion in 2022 and invested about $3 billion between 2019 and 2021, with major companies like IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Intel leading R&D efforts .

IBM, for example, plans to release a quantum computer with over 1,000 qubits by 2025 and currently operates a 127-qubit machine .

Google achieved quantum supremacy in 2019 with its Sycamore processor, performing a calculation in 200 seconds that would take a supercomputer 10,000 years .

Canada has invested $40 million to help Xanadu Quantum Technologies build the world’s first photonic-based, fault-tolerant quantum computer, part of a $177.8 million project expected to create 530 new high-tech jobs .

Australia has invested nearly $1 billion to build a strong quantum ecosystem .

India’s National Quantum Mission is funded at ₹6,003 crore (about $725 million) over eight years, though regulatory and funding challenges persist .

Finland operationalized its first 5-qubit quantum computer in collaboration with IQM, aiming for scalable, accessible quantum systems .

Lessons learned include the infancy of practical quantum systems, the need for continued investment, and a significant talent gap, with collaboration between companies and governments urged to address workforce shortages [f202

China, the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and Finland are among the leading countries in quantum computing development, each making substantial investments and achieving notable milestones.

China has invested approximately $15 billion in public funds for quantum research, unveiled a 504-qubit chip, and delivered its first practical quantum computer system, the 24-qubit Wuyan system, making it the third country after Canada and the U.S.

to deliver a complete quantum computer system to a customer .

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Content: Chandeliers, ‘qubits’ and Schrödinger’s cat: Inside the bizarre world of quantum computing

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Chandeliers, ‘qubits’ and Schrödinger’s cat: Inside the bizarre world of quantum computing

In the quantum realm, the laws of physics are different. Now its mind-bending tech could soon transform our lives. How does it work?

It was 2009, and a group of scientists had crowded around a tiny monitor in a Sydney physics laboratory. The team, led by electrical engineer Andrea Morello, held their collective breath and peered at a single flat line on the screen. Then, in the blink of an eye, the line changed: it was a series of blips, like a heartbeat. They’d hit paydirt. “When you see that symbol, you’re in the game,” recalls physicist Charles Tahan.

Welcome to the quantum world, a subatomic realm – yes, smaller than an atom – where the laws of physics are, well, different. The experiment made Morello and his team the first in the world to show that a quantum computer could be made using not diamonds, not the superconductor niobium, but everyday silicon. “To show you could do that, 100 different things had to go right,” says Tahan.

Quantum computing is one of the key technologies defining this century. Its proponents say it will do for computers what the car did to the horse and buggy. It will upend encryption and molecular biology. In theory, it could even possibly find cures for cancer. Australia is among the world leaders in a quantum computing gold rush, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese saying his government is “serious about building a strong quantum ecosystem” and investing nearly a billion dollars.

Yet despite eye-watering outlays worldwide, quantum computing is still in its infancy, part of a mind-bending world that physicists are only beginning to fully grasp. What is it? And how will it make a difference to our lives?

How does a quantum computer work (and why did Alice in Wonderland have the jump on it?)

It’s often remarked that it looks like a beautiful chandelier, or a wedding cake. And IBM’s quantum computer, one of the world’s largest, is certainly an intriguing object, an intricate dome of golden wires and graceful tubes suspended from a ceiling.

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The part we can see, though, is really just the control and support system for a microchip (currently a version called Condor) buried deep inside. The glittering exoskeleton is there to keep its tiny heart as cold as possible – a hundred times colder than the coldest depths of space – and to feed information in and out, the process that makes it a “computer” and not just a science experiment.

The chip itself is smaller than a postage stamp, with several layers of circuitry and metal sandwiched in a tiny square, cooled to improve conductivity and to eliminate “noise”, the bugbear of many such devices. But even what we see here is not where the action happens. For that, we have to go deeper still, down into the chip and well beyond what’s visible through even the most powerful microscope, beyond the layers of individual atoms, into the atoms themselves.

‘The truth is the universe doesn’t run by the rules that we see every day – gravity, you bounce a ball and it falls. It runs on these other rules: quantum mechanics.’

In the subatomic realm of electrons, protons and photons, things happen very differently. Indeed, these tiny particles have no use for Newton’s laws of physics, nor even many of Einstein’s. “The truth,” says Tahan, “is the universe doesn’t run by the rules that we see every day – gravity, you bounce a ball and it falls. It runs on these other rules: quantum mechanics.”

Why these particles behave as they do in the quantum realm is a difficult concept to get your head around. Even Einstein resisted aspects of it, famously arguing that “God does not play dice with the Universe”. It was a misstep. “Because he didn’t believe in the completeness of quantum mechanics,” says Morello, “he lost a lot of productive years because he didn’t understand how it is possible that this thing is true.”

Many leading physicists investigated the concept from the early 1900s, including some familiar from popular culture today, notably Einstein and Neils Bohr (portrayed in Oppenheimer), Werner Heisenberg (whose name Walter White stole for his drug-chemist alter ego in Breaking Bad) and Viennese physicist Erwin Schrödinger, of the famous cat experiment (explained below).

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Lewis Carroll, meanwhile, may have had the jump on quantum physics with his ideas in the Alice books, as James Renner observed in The Wall Street Journal in 2015. “We speak of going down the wormhole into a mysterious world that defies Newtonian physics, where once Alice went down the rabbit hole into a mysterious world that had much the same effect. Now we speak of quantum particles being in two places at once or even Schrödinger’s cat being alive and dead at the same time, long after the Cheshire Cat’s grin was magically displaced from its body.”

The quantum realm has only truly begun to reveal itself to us relatively recently. In 1964, the Irish-born physicist John Bell published one of the most important theorems, which, according to Professor Andrew Whitaker in Physics World, “opened up the possibility of experimental philosophy, the study of what are normally thought of as philosophical issues in experiments. Not only do these experiments probe the deepest and most profound aspects of quantum theory, they also provide information on the fundamental nature of the universe.”

At the time, Bell’s theorem could not be tested in a lab. That would come in the late 1960s and early 1970s when experimentalists such as John Clauser began to show that the weirdness Bell had described on paper actually occurred in the real world. Which, at the time, was considered quite rude. One eminent physicist “was highly offended by my impertinent effort and told me that it was tantamount to professing a disbelief in quantum physics,” Clauser later recalled.

He and other apostates continued their work because he found some of the predictions “sufficiently bizarre that I could not accept them without seeing experimental proof”. Working with leftover lab equipment – “physics department scrap” – he went on to provide experimental evidence that refuted even Einstein’s theories. “I was very sad to see that my own experiment had proven Einstein wrong,” he said. Clauser would go on to win the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics alongside Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger for their groundbreaking experiments with so-called “entangled” particles.

Quantum physicists still despair at the difficulties of explaining their weird world to outsiders. “Many writers fall back on boilerplate that makes physicists howl in agony,” wrote computer scientist Scott Aaronson in The New York Times in 2019. Unfortunately, says Gerard Milburn, a quantum physicist from the University of Queensland, “The quantum world lies beyond the reach of natural language.”

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But we’ll give it a go. Chiefly, particles in the quantum realm aren’t tied down to being in one place or state in the way bigger things are in the outside world, such as cats, which tend to be in one place at once. They obey different rules entirely. The first way to understand this oddness harks back to high-school science and how light can behave as both a particle and a wave. Photons – bursts of light – can act like ball bearings, with position and momentum. Yet light also behaves like a wave washing over a beach in a way that a ball bearing can’t. That’s a quantum physics party trick.

What is Schrödinger’s cat?

The most famous primer for quantum mechanics is the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, a mind experiment devised by Schrödinger in 1935. A hypothetical cat goes into a box with a vial of poison gas, which has a 50-50 chance of killing it. You close the box and can’t see inside. So, without opening the box, you can’t know whether the poison has killed the cat or not. Therefore, posited Schrödinger, puss is neither dead nor alive but both – until you open the box.

In quantum mechanics, this state is called “superposition”. It’s impossible to describe properly without a background in higher-level mathematics, which we lack, but it generally means not knowing whether, say, an electron is over here, or over there, or – cat-like – in both places at the same time. Another way of looking at it is to visualise a coin spinning on its side. Until it stops and lands on one side or another, it’s not heads or tails but both.

At least, kind of.

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“Every explanation we give in lay terms is in some way wrong,” says Stephen Bartlett, a theoretical quantum physicist and director of the University of Sydney Nano Institute. “People often say a quantum superposition is in the value zero and the value one at the same time. That’s sort of right, and sort of not right.” Says Morello: “This is where language is failing us, right? If you’re trying to say that in plain English, it sounds really weird. But if you actually think about, you know, the mathematics of it, and the actual physical embodiment of that, it actually makes perfect sense.” Suffice to say, a real cat cannot find itself in “superposition”: this is a state that can exist only in the subatomic world.

How is this useful (and what’s a qubit)?

In a conventional computer, information is encoded as voltages that pass around the system thanks to millions of tiny transistors – essentially, gates or switches that turn on and off. A quantum computer is similar except that instead of using transistors as switches it uses subatomic particles, such as electrons or photons, that can have many more states than simply on or off, according to their position, momentum, spin direction and polarisation. Once harnessed – and there are many ways of doing that – these particles-as-switches are called “qubits”, a play on the word “bit”, the smallest unit of data that a computer can process and store.

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Information can be encoded on qubits in various ways: for his computers, Morello uses silicon and strong magnetic fields like those found in MRI machines. “The stuff that I build in my lab is actually a small silicon chip the size of a fingernail,” he says, “but the whole infrastructure around it is quite fancy. It’s a very powerful refrigerator that cools down the chip to [just] above absolute zero.

Critically, qubits can relate to other qubits in a state called “entanglement”. This enables quantum computers to perform multiple calculations simultaneously – which is their superpower. Schrödinger described entanglement as “the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought”. Sceptical Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance”. Gerard Milburn says entanglement is great for building a computer “because if you want to have all these switches, having them strongly correlated is exactly what you want. And if you can control those correlations, you can do computation.”

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It’s these characteristics that have scientists and engineers excited. Not because quantum computers will necessarily take over from the conventional miracles we so rely on today but because they can do some particular things that transistor-based machines either struggle with or fail at completely. Today’s supercomputer might try to simulate molecular behaviour with “brute force”, says IBM’s quantum department. “But as it moves past the simplest, most straightforward molecules available, the supercomputer stalls. Quantum algorithms take a new approach to these sorts of complex problems, creating multidimensional computational spaces.”

‘Calculations that are completely impossible … would rapidly become possible on a quantum computer.’

This might include modelling how a drug might affect a virus, how new materials in aeroplanes might react to stress, or the exact process necessary to create a perfect chemical reaction.

“Calculations that are completely impossible – not just on present-day conventional computers but any conceivable future conventional computer – would rapidly become possible on a quantum computer,” says Andrew Doherty, professor of physics at Sydney University. “These are things where the application of that computer would be transformative to people’s lives without every home, you know, having a laptop quantum computer.”

Whether quantum computing will also revolutionise artificial intelligence is less certain. AI works by drawing from a huge amount of data, which is not something that naturally fits on a quantum computer, says Morello. “The problem with quantum computers in general and, in particular, with applications to AI is that loading data into them and reading data out of them is slow and cumbersome and prone to errors. It’s a bottleneck.”

Why is it so hard to build quantum machines?

Creating the qubits is hard, whatever material you start with. Interfacing with them via tiny wires like the golden lattice in IBM’s machines is hard. Getting accurate information from them is hard: “noise”, in the form of vibration or spurious electromagnetic signals, makes them behave badly and give poor results – “decoherence”, in physics speak.

Much of Andrew Doherty’s team’s work these days is in figuring out how to reduce this noise to acceptable levels and compensating for the errors that noise produces. “Compared to our conventional computers, quantum technology [computers] are very noisy devices,” he says. “They go wrong one time in 1000 as opposed to one time in an astronomically huge number of uses of [normal computers].”

Teams around the world are working on multiple approaches both to building the machines and compensating for their eccentricities, from labs in Australia to the tech giants Google, Microsoft and IBM – its Quantum Lab relies on superconducting qubits made from aluminium and niobiumand the Chinese government.

Some versions, such as IBM’s and Morello’s, chill the atoms to keep them as stable as possible. In contrast, the Australian company Quantum Brilliance is working with synthetic diamonds because they work at room temperature. “Unlike other materials,” says co-founder Marcus Doherty (no relation to Andrew), “diamond’s incredible hardness means that even at room temperature, there isn’t enough thermal energy in the environment to create vibrations that destroy the quantum properties of qubits.”

‘People are working really hard to try to find different mathematical problems that they think maybe quantum computers can’t crack.’

Another key moment in the quantum timeline came in 1994 when US mathematician Peter Shor showed that a quantum computer could crack encryption standards safeguarding everything from national intelligence systems to bank accounts. “He devised an algorithm, in theory, that he would need to run on a quantum computer,” says Bartlett. “And if you could build a quantum computer of sufficient size, then yeah, all information security falls apart.” Cybersecurity experts call that scenario Q-Day. “At the moment, people are working really hard to try to find different mathematical problems that they think maybe quantum computers can’t crack,” says Bartlett.

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In 2001, IBM made a seven-qubit device controlled through radio frequency pulses to demonstrate Shor’s Theorem. IBM’s prototype wasn’t given a huge task, managing to calculate that three times five was … wait for it ... 15. Yet this was considered a great success, even if it had shades of the famous supercomputer Deep Thought from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which ponders the question of “life, the universe and everything” for thousands of years before giving the answer: 42.(Adams also dreamed up the Infinite Improbability Drive for a spaceship called the Heart of Gold, which used quantum theory to allow it to cross through every point in the universe simultaneously, allowing interstellar travel without all that “tedious mucking about in hyperspace”.)

Then, in 2019, Google claimed its 54-qubit Sycamore processor had performed a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years – a breakthrough some breathlessly likened to the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903. Others were more sceptical, saying it would be many more years before quantum computers would have enough qubits – and be stable enough – to do anything actually useful. IBM said it could simulate Google’s experiment in two-and-a-half days on a “normal” computer, albeit if it had access to the Oak Ridge Summit supercomputer, a beast occupying an area the size of two basketball courts. IBM’s shimmering Eagle, meanwhile, had just 127 qubits; its successors, Osprey and now Condor, have pushed the bar to over 1000 and it plans for 1386 qubits in its Kookaburra in 2025.

Yet most of these devices are still basically proofs of concept, says Morello, the first step to manufacturing and miniaturising, as we saw with today’s transistor-based computers, which started out as rooms full of valves and cables. In the post-World War II era, says Andrew Doherty, “computers took up office floors of buildings in Manhattan and people put paper cards into them to program them. Out came numbers that even my childhood pocket calculator could have calculated right.” Many hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into developing computer technology, in packaging it for convenience and getting the components to work reliably, he says. “That whole engineering thing has got to grow up around these quantum technologies.”

Already, Marcus Doherty’s Quantum Brilliance has installed a quantum computer at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth and is about to export computers, at this stage for customers to experiment with quantum computing and work out how to make it useful. In the future, finding commercial applications for a quantum computer will require tailoring it, at least initially, says UNSW’s Maja Cassidy, a former quantum researcher for Microsoft. “People have to go in and understand a company’s problem, how they’re using classical computing and … work out what section might be enhanced by the quantum computer.”

Who is leading the quantum race?

China is the only other nation giving the United States a run for its money. Its leader, Xi Jinping, put accelerating quantum technology in his 2021 five-year plan. McKinsey & Company estimates China has spent at least $15.3 billion in public funds on quantum research. That partly came to fruition in April with the Chinese Academy of Science’s unveiling of a 504-qubit chip, still half the size of IBM’s biggest.

For its part, Australia got a head start with quantum research in the 1990s. Today, two major spinoffs from UNSW research are pursuing silicon-based quantum computing: Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC), led by Professor Michelle Simmons, and Diraq, led by Professor Andrew Dzurak. SQC’s approach involves embedding phosphorus atoms within a wafer of silicon. Dzurak’s approach involves trapping electrons on silicon transistors. Both have the advantage of silicon chips already being ubiquitous. “Today, in our phones and our laptops, the silicon chips that are in those have upwards of a billion transistors on them,” says Dzurak. “The benefit of the technology that we’ve developed is that we are also able to get millions, and ultimately billions, of quantum bits onto a single silicon chip.”

‘Computers as we know them today are an absolutely mind-blowing achievement. So any technology that has the ambition of being an alternative or being better than that has a phenomenally high bar to clear.’

Other leading players in Australia include Q-CTRL, which is working on controlling and enhancing quantum hardware; quantum security company QuintessenceLabs; and Doherty’s Quantum Brilliance, which used its synthetic diamonds in the world-first integration of a two-qubit quantum device into a supercomputer at room temperature in 2022.

Meanwhile, out of the University of Queensland came early gains in “photonic” quantum computing, which harnesses particles of light – photons – as qubits. In April, the federal and Queensland governments jointly set aside $940 million in share purchases, grants and loans for PsiQuantum, a Silicon Valley company whose founders include Australian professors Jeremy O’Brien and Terry Rudolph. Unlike ions or electrons, photons are not charged, Bartlett says, so are not sent haywire by electromagnetic forces – but they are hard to manipulate and measure.

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Another approach involves “trapped ion” quantum computing, pursued by US company IonQ: physicists take an atom, flick off an electron so it is positively charged, then suspend the resulting ion within an electromagnetic field and manipulate the ion with lasers. But Bartlett says this approach will be hard to scale, given the technology to suspend millions of ion qubits doesn’t yet exist.

In April, the federal government also announced $18 million for the University of Sydney to establish Quantum Australia, a research consortium between several universities headed by Bartlett. “It used to be a small research community,” he says. “You absolutely needed to speak the common language of everyone else, which were the rules of physics. Now we are really seeing quite a bit of specialisation.”

Even if quantum computers develop practical uses, they will likely live in vast, super-cooled server farms where land and power are cheap. We’ll communicate with them through our everyday devices, much as we download and upload data from cloud servers, Netflix, TikTok, DropBox, whatever, today. The real challenge for quantum computing, says Morello, is that the alternative is “really, really good”. “Computers as we know them today are an absolutely mind-blowing achievement. So any technology that has the ambition of being an alternative or being better than that has a phenomenally high bar to clear.”

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The Silent Quantum Threat To Web3 Cyber Resilience

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If you are worried about DeFi’s war with cyber-hackers and the cyber-marauders at the gates of Web3, take a deep breath. Quantum computing is coming and could render today’s digital cryptography used in DeFi and Web3 useless.

The emerging generation of quantum computers currently under development will have the potential to hack Web3, very quickly. The cybersecurity and financial consequences of this could be unprecedented. The solutions are not straightforward and forthcoming and require complex work and most importantly, community consensus.

The Next Generation Of Computing - Quantum

Quantum computing is the next generation of computing machines and techniques that are very different from current computers, known in the jargon as classical computers. Quantum computers are more powerful for certain calculations. This means that calculations that would take thousands of years on today’s supercomputers are accomplished instantly by quantum ones.

Amongst these calculations are very useful applications like simulating drugs and their effect in organisms over time avoiding lab tests, financial forecasting and better predicting market behaviors to better avoid crisis, and many innovations across business and society.

Nevertheless, the most attractive application to cyber-criminals and the most concerning to society, is the capacity of these computers to hack the current cryptography of the Internet, telecommunications, and blockchain networks, jeopardizing our Web3 identities, digital assets, and their stores of value.

What Makes Quantum Computers So Different And Powerful?

Today’s classical computers are binary because their basic units of information are bits which can be either in a 0 or 1 value. The equivalent in quantum computing is quantum bits, or qubits, a basic unit of information. Qubits leverage two phenomena from quantum physics: entanglement, and superposition, and are used to do parallel computing exponentially faster than a classical binary computer.

For calculations that can be modelled, 50 computations on a quantum computer could achieve a result that would require a staggeringly large number of computations, 1,125,899,906,842,624 on any of today’s computers and at a millennium’s pace (N2^N=2^50) for all of you math enthusiasts.

Web3 is an emerging concept that assembles different constituent technologies, protocols, and principles. One of these principles is the use of RDF, OWL, XLM and other languages and protocols to enable a machine-readable web suitable for AI, which was defined as the “Semantic Web” over two decades ago by Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s founding father.

A big constituent of Web3 is the use of blockchain technology for decentralized and trusted peer-to-peer interactions and value exchanges. Digital wallets as personal, private, and portable key, data, and asset management tools are a key constituent to using the blockchain. Different combinations of these technologies, protocols, and principles are being used by a new generation of applications and platforms, which together are the main constituents to Web3.

Among the most popular use cases emerging in the world of Web3 commerce are cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, DeFi, DAO’s, and NFT’s. Soon we will be using different forms of tokenized money including central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and we will be trading and investing in tokenized real-world assets like real estate, gold, and automobiles in real time – amongst all sorts of other things – everything that can be tokenized will be tokenized in Web3.

We will be able to own and present ourselves from our digital wallets with our “digital ID”, driver’s license, health records and certificates, and diplomas which will be verifiable against secure blockchain networks. Many Web3 applications use blockchain networks as an additional layer of the Internet protocol, something which Berners-Lee is less enthusiastic about.

Blockchain networks allow for cryptographic proofs of off-chain data and information, like real estate, to be immutably recorded and universally verifiable, making use cases compelling for government and business registries. Blockchain technology also allows for assets and value to be represented by on-chain tokens so they can be traded against each other or against any form or tokenized money eliminating any post-trade settlement and clearing process.

Blockchain Technology – The Weakest Link With Quantum Computing?

As appealing as it all sounds, blockchain networks are today possibly the most vulnerable technology to attacks by quantum computers. In 2016, the National Institute for Standards in Technology (NIST) and the National Security Agency (NSA) began to warn about the seriousness of the quantum threat.

NIST warns, “If large-scale quantum computers are ever built, they will be able to break many of the public-key cryptosystems currently in use.”

“A sufficiently large quantum computer, if built, would be capable of undermining all widely-deployed public key algorithms used for key establishment and digital signatures,” echoes the NSA.

Public-key cryptosystems and algorithms referred to by NIST and NSA are essentially the mechanisms that we use to encrypt our telecommunications over the phone or the Internet and to control our assets in blockchain networks.

In simple terms, when we send any communication over the Internet such as an email, a transaction from our wallet to a node, or a communication between nodes, we are encrypting the information with the recipient’s public key so the recipient can decrypt it with their private key. Similarly, when we send a transaction to a blockchain we sign it with our private key, so we can for instance, prove that we are the owner of certain amount of bitcoin we want to transfer.

Marcos Allende Lopez, CTO of LACNet, says, “What NIST and NSA warnings reflect is that quantum computers can discover any of those private keys from our public keys. Most prominent blockchain networks, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, rely on an Elliptic Curve public-key algorithm. This algorithm, as well as others such as RSA and Discrete Logarithm frequently used to encrypt communications over the Internet, are already proven to be breakable by quantum computers.

Allende is a quantum physicist who leads the technical work in blockchain, Web3, and quantum technologies at the Inter-American Development Bank and has designed and piloted an implementation of a quantum-resistant blockchain. Addressing the delegates and the Necker Blockchain Summit this summer, Allende warned, “If quantum hacking has not happened already is only because quantum computers are not large enough yet.”

In 2013, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, pitched, “If you have bitcoins in an address you never use they are safe, otherwise, anyone can steal them.”

This happens when someone makes a transaction, and their public key is exposed to the entire network. However, in July at the Eth 2.0 conference, Butterin admitted that, not only is there not a plan or roadmap for Ethereum to become quantum-resistant, but that the solution is not even know yet and the problem is being postponed to solve more urgent matters such as scalability, interoperability, or costs until quantum computers are ready.

The New Quantum Digital Space Race

Since 2000, private and public entities have competed in a race to develop quantum computers that could scale. At present, IBM leads the race with 127 qubits, however, the number of qubits for breaking current cryptography and being relevant for other disruptive applications is estimated to be in the order of thousands, and at least between 1,000 and 3,000, or more.

Current implementations do not achieve “error correction”, meaning that errors are propagated without the control that is necessary to scale, however, many experts predict quantum computing at scale is just around the corner.

China has invested as much as $11 billion in quantum between 2019 and 2021 followed by $5 billion by the E.U. and $3 billion by the U.S. Every global superpower understands that this may be the next most valuable technology on the road to digital dominance.

The truth is that the quantum threat is in general not well understood in the Web3 world, and the solutions are very complex to implement. Replacing current cryptographic algorithms with one of the new quantum-resistant public-key algorithms that NIST has recently standardized in July 2022 would be almost impossible.

Alternatively, adding a quantum-resistant signature into every transaction might be more feasible but requires consensus, is technically difficult to implement, and could have very negative consequences such as reducing processing throughput, considerably.

“As difficult as it might seem, the time to act is now. By using blockchain technology we are already exposed to the hack today, crack tomorrow practice,” asserts Allende in an industry call to action.

Being realistic, are we really expecting those that achieve building large quantum computers to disclose their projects and users? A strategist might posit that cyber-criminals will silently use quantum computing to strategically hack communications and assets without being noticed as a quantum computer. It is not an enigma to find out cases when this has happened in the past.

As devotees of the Netflix series Game of Thrones know, “winter is coming.” When is the right time to start making Web3 quantum cyber-resilient if not now? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

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What are important areas in quantum research?

What have been the landmark achievements in quantum computing?

IBM's world's first integrated quantum computing system, IBM Quantum System One

What are important areas in quantum research?

What have been the landmark achievements in quantum computing?

IBM's world's first integrated quantum computing system, IBM Quantum System One

China’s Jiuzhang 3.0 quantum computer prototype, using 255 detected photons, can solve Gaussian boson sampling problems 10 quadrillion times faster than the fastest supercomputers .

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Content: Computing

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

China Delivers Its First Practical Quantum Computer System to a Customer

China’s Science Ministry on Monday announced that the country’s first practical quantum computer was delivered to a user, which the agency didn’t identify, a year ago.

The 24-qubit Wuyan system based on superconducting technology was built by Origin Quantum Computing Technology, a company founded in 2017 by two of the country’s leading quantum physicists, Guo Guoping and Guo Guangcan. A qubit in the quantum world performs functions akin to bits in the digital world.

With the on-premises installation of the Wuyan system, China became the third country, after Canada and the United States, to deliver a complete quantum computer system to a customer.

Some skeptics questioned the timing of the announcement.

“Quantum technology has a high priority for national security in China. If this were something very important, I doubt it would be disclosed like this in a transparent way by Chinese authorities,” explained Weifeng Zhong, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

“The fact that it was delayed for a year suggests that they realize now that it’s not important to national security, so they’re trying to use it to build China’s image as a technology leader at a time when they’re trying to open up their economy to the rest of the world,” Zhong told TechNewsWorld.

Important Step

However, Hodan Omaar, a senior AI policy analyst at the Center for Data Innovation, a think tank studying the intersection of data, technology, and public policy, in Washington, D.C., maintained the announcement shows that China has made an important step in its quantum development.

“Overcoming technical challenges on the path toward large-scale quantum computers will depend on the ability to scale the number of qubits in quantum systems, much like modern classical computers have depended on the growth in the number of transistors in superconducting chips,” Omaar told TechNewsWorld.

“Investing in near-term quantum computing applications helps bolster the development of longer-term use cases of the technology, thereby helping to improve competitiveness,” she added.

Skip Sanzeri, co-founder and COO of QuSecure, a maker of quantum-safe security solutions in San Mateo, Calif., called the announcement “formidable” because China is stating that they have a fully functional quantum computer, albeit the qubit count is low.

“Nonetheless, error correction and noise reduction are two significant factors in ensuring that a quantum computer can process data and provide applications that we can rely on,” Sanzeri told TechNewsWorld. “By announcing that they have been able to get to this level shows that China is making progress towards larger quantum computers.”

Bucking a Trend

The Wuyan system appears to be on par with other systems in the market, noted Heather West, a senior research analyst at IDC’, an international market research company.

“The fact that they sold a 24 qubit system to someone isn’t that different from what we’re seeing elsewhere around the world,” West told TechNewsWorld.

Delivering a standalone system like the Wuyan is actually bucking the current trend in the market.

“Most quantum computers that people are accessing today are accessed through the cloud,” explained Doug Finke, an analyst with Global Quantum Intelligence, an international market intelligence firm.

“This Wuyan computer is being delivered to a customer in an on-premise situation,” Finke told TechNewsWorld. “On-premise has a lot of disadvantages. You have to worry about maintenance. You have to worry about spare parts. You have to worry about calibration.”

“In addition,” he continued, “quantum computing innovation is so fast that they become obsolete in about two years. So few people want an on-premise quantum computer. They’re much more comfortable with the cloud.”

Superconducting Challenges

The Wuyan system is built using superconducting chip technology, one of the earliest technologies for quantum computers. Since its introduction, other technologies have been explored. They include photonics, trapped ions, and neutral atoms.

“At the moment, no one knows which technology will be the winner or if there’ll be a combination of technologies that will combine for efficacious quantum applications,” Sanzeri said.

“Superconducting is very difficult,” he explained. “It requires near zero Kelvin refrigeration.”

“The electrons used in superconducting quantum computers are very hard to manage due to very short coherence times,” he continued. “That’s why they must be cooled to such a low temperature.”

Other methods are managing longer coherence times and a faster path to the desired goal of 1,000 error-corrected qubits, he added.

“The million-dollar question is what technology will win the race to the fault-tolerant quantum computer,” West said. “There might not be one winner. There might not be one system that comes out on top. It might be that certain kinds of systems are better than others at solving certain kinds of problems.”

Long View

Omaar countered that superconducting chips have a number of advantages over competing technologies.

“First, superconducting qubits are solid-state electrical circuits that are easier to control because they are manipulated using microwaves,” she said. “Scientists can therefore use easily accessible commercial microwave devices and equipment in superconducting quantum computing applications.”

“Second,” she continued, “because preparing superconducting circuits is based on the existing method for fabricating semiconductor chips, the development of high-quality devices can leverage advanced chip-making technologies, which is good for manufacturing and scalability.”

Despite developments like China’s Wuyan system, the arrival of a quantum computer that can tackle problems beyond the capacity of silicon computers appears to be years away.

“What quantum computers are going to be best for is solving complex, intractable problems beyond the scope of classical compute technology,” West said. “Those problems are years away from a quantum computer solving.”

“To get to that, we need at least a million qubits,” she continued. “That’s going to take a lot of work in scaling and stabilizing the qubits. Qubits are very sensitive to outside noise. As a result, the error rates are high in the technology we have.”

Despite the exuberance exhibited by many, we’re still in the early days of quantum computing, added Richard Stiennon, founder and chief research analyst at IT-Harvest, a cybersecurity industry analyst firm in Birmingham, Mich.

“There are many physical constraints on quantum computing that require precision in length of pathways — we are talking microns — and resistance to forces — footsteps can interfere with it. Supercooled chips just add to the complexity,” Stiennon told TechNewsWorld.

“I put it in the same realm as developing usable nuclear fusion as an energy source,” he said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars and decades to show a glimmer of progress.”

John P. Mello Jr. has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including the Boston Business Journal, the Boston Phoenix, Megapixel.Net and Government Security News. Email John.

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government committed $1.8 billion in 2022 and invested about $3 billion between 2019 and 2021, with major companies like IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Intel leading R&D efforts .

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Finland’s First 5-Qubit Quantum Computer Is Now Operational

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VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland recently announced that the country’s first operational 5-qubit quantum computer is up and running. Together with the quantum computing hardware startup IQM, VTT has taken its first steps to enable the building of quantum computers that will be both scalable and easier to manufacture, allowing more companies to begin their quantum computing journey.

The incredible computing performance of quantum computers makes it possible to solve problems that are beyond the capabilities of modern high-performance computers. In the future, quantum computers will be used, for instance, to accurately model viruses and drugs or used to design materials that are challenging to design with today’s technology.

“The development of quantum computing will affect all industries. Our experience in building the quantum computer, and our know-how in developing quantum algorithms will help us develop quantum foresight to, for example, identify future trends and support companies in understanding how and when their business will be affected,” says Pekka Pursula, Research Manager at VTT. “The best way to do this will be for companies to work together with VTT, and actually use our new hardware.”

The now-unveiled 5-qubit quantum computer is located at Micronova, part of OtaNano, the national research infrastructure for micro and nanotechnology, jointly run by VTT and Aalto University.

The big challenge in quantum computing is scalability. Quantum physicists and engineers around the world are trying to figure out how to scale quantum computing hardware to include hundreds and thousands of qubits, scale up the production in an economically efficient way, and scale algorithms and use of quantum computing in real-life applications.

VTT has 30 years of expertise in quantum technology research and excellent facilities to work on hardware scaling. The scaling of the use requires VTT to work hand-in-hand with the companies to develop algorithms for specific applications.

“Today’s announcement marks an important milestone for IQM and for the European quantum initiatives. With the completion of this phase, IQM will become one of the very few quantum companies that can deliver an on-premises quantum computer to a customer. I congratulate our partners, VTT and also the entire IQM team who has managed to deliver this ambitious milestone during the pandemic. This is just the first phase of the delivery and because of our ability to upgrade the systems, we are looking forward to working with VTT on delivering the 20-qubit and the 50-qubit systems,” says Dr. Jan Goetz, CEO and co-founder of IQM

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Supporting Canada's leadership in quantum computing to grow the economy and create jobs

TORONTO, Jan. 23, 2023 /CNW/ - Quantum technologies are at the leading edge of science and innovation. As Canadian researchers, workers and businesses continue to demonstrate leadership on the world stage in innovating and developing quantum technologies, we have the potential to transform how we work and live in Canada and around the world – in areas from fighting climate change to making advancements in health care. The Government of Canada will continue to support Canadian companies to help them keep growing and staying competitive, while driving economic growth and creating highly skilled and well-paying jobs for Canadians.

The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced a new federal investment of $40 million to enable the Toronto-based Canadian quantum computing company Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc. to build and commercialize the world's first photonic-based, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Once developed, this computer will have the potential to provide world leading capabilities to help solve complex data problems and could be used in a variety of sectors such as finance, transportation, environmental modelling, and health.

Supported through the government's Strategic Innovation Fund, this $177.8 million project is expected to create 530 new highly skilled positions in the high-tech and quantum computing fields.

Home to some of the world's largest quantum tech hubs, Canada is well positioned to become a global leader in the developing quantum sector, which will create new opportunities for Canadians and Canadian businesses. The Government of Canada will continue to invest in innovative companies to grow the economy and create highly skilled and well-paying jobs for Canadians.

Quotes

"Quantum technology is changing the world as we know it. With the potential to solve difficult problems in key areas such as health care, finance, and climate sciences, this sector expands the realm of possibility. Today's announcement is great news for Canadian workers and businesses. This investment will bring good jobs, spur economic growth, boost innovation, and solidify Canada as a world leader in quantum technology."

— The Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada

"Quantum technologies will set the course of the future and thanks to companies like Xanadu, Canada is at the forefront ready to lead. With today's announcement, our government is strengthening Canada's position in quantum technology and helping to create more economic growth and good jobs for Canadians. We'll continue to build this sector through our National Quantum Strategy and support made-in-Canada technology so Canada remains a world leader for decades to come."

— The Hon. François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry

"The government's continued investment in quantum technologies has been invaluable to our success. We are proud to be a Canadian company and, with this investment, are excited to enter the next phase in our mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere."

— Christian Weedbrook, Founder and CEO, Xanadu

Quick Facts

  • Since the birth of quantum science more than 100 years ago, quantum technologies have been the source of many game-changing innovations such as semiconductors and the laser.
  • Quantum science is the study, manipulation, and control of systems at the atomic and subatomic level.
  • It is estimated that by 2045, the Canadian quantum industry will be a $139 billion industry, including all economic effects, and account for over 200,000 jobs, according to a study commissioned by the National Research Council in 2020.
  • Earlier this month, the Government of Canada launched its National Quantum Strategy, which invests an additional $360 million to help solidify Canada as a global leader in quantum technologies.
  • Over the past 10 years, the Government of Canada has invested more than $1 billion in quantum research and science.
  • Additionally, the government has invested in bringing new quantum technologies to the Canadian and global markets, including investments through Canada's regional development agencies, the Strategic Innovation Fund, and the National Research Council of Canada's Industrial Research Assistance Program.
  • Xanadu is a notable contributor to Canada's innovation ecosystem and has committed to continuing to support innovation, growth, and Canada's research and development sector.
  • Founded in 2016, Xanadu is a Toronto-based Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Xanadu has become one of the world's leading quantum hardware and software companies and leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development.

Associated Links

This document is also available at https://pm.gc.ca

SOURCE Prime Minister's Office

View original content: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/January2023/23/c3179.html

What companies are leading in developing quantum computing?

What countries and blocs are leading in developing quantum computing?

What companies are leading in developing quantum computing?

What countries and blocs are leading in developing quantum computing?

IBM, for example, plans to release a quantum computer with over 1,000 qubits by 2025 and currently operates a 127-qubit machine .

What are important areas in quantum research?

What are the challenges in quantum computing research?

What companies are leading in developing quantum computing?

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What seminal quantum computers/ processors have been developed?

What are important areas in quantum research?

What are the challenges in quantum computing research?

What companies are leading in developing quantum computing?

What countries and blocs are leading in developing quantum computing?

What seminal quantum computers/ processors have been developed?

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What companies are leading in developing quantum computing?

What countries and blocs are leading in developing quantum computing?

What seminal quantum computers/ processors have been developed?

Google achieved quantum supremacy in 2019 with its Sycamore processor, performing a calculation in 200 seconds that would take a supercomputer 10,000 years .

What advantages do quantum computers have over conventional computers?

extremely complex calculations
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What are important areas in quantum research?

What companies are leading in developing quantum computing?

What countries and blocs are leading in developing quantum computing?

What have been the landmark achievements in quantum computing?

Google's Sycamore quantum supremacy experiment

Canada has invested $40 million to help Xanadu Quantum Technologies build the world’s first photonic-based, fault-tolerant quantum computer, part of a $177.8 million project expected to create 530 new high-tech jobs .

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China secures world-leading computational power with freshly unveiled quantum computer prototype

2023-10-12 08:59:07Global Times Editor : Li Yan ECNS App Download

Introductory illustration to the Jiuzhang 3.0 quantum computer prototype. (Photo/Courtesy of University of Science and Technology of China)

With the successful development of the Jiuzhang 3.0 quantum computer prototype, which makes use of 255 detected photons, China continues to hold a world-leading position in the field of quantum computer research and development, lead scientists for the program told the Global Times on Wednesday.

The research team, composed of renowned quantum physicists Pan Jianwei and Lu Chaoyang from the University of Science and Technology of China in collaboration with the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center, announced the successful construction of a 255-photon-based prototype quantum computer named Jiuzhang 3.0 early Wednesday morning.

The quantum computing feat accomplished by the team of talents achieves a speed that is 10 quadrillion times faster in solving Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) problems compared with the world's fastest supercomputers.

According to a press release Pan's team provided to the Global Times on Wednesday, this achievement has once again "renewed the world record in the field of optical quantum information technology, solving the mathematical problem of Gaussian boson sampling 10 quadrillion times faster than the current fastest supercomputer in the world, taking an important step toward the development of quantum computers."

The study was published online in the journal Physical Review Letters early Wednesday morning.

Meanwhile, according to the publicly disclosed optimal algorithm, the speed of Jiuzhang 3.0 in processing Gaussian boson sampling is one million times faster than its predecessor, the 133-photon-based Jiuzhang 2.0. Jiuzhang 2.0 could calculate the most complex sample in 1 microsecond, while the current fastest supercomputer Frontier would take more than 20 billion years to do the same calculation, according to the press release.

Lu Chaoyang, a key member of the research team, explained that quantum computing is specially designed for solving highly complicated calculations while the simpler calculations are the job of regular computers. This is why the comparison was made between the Jiuzhang 3.0 and supercomputers.

Currently, the prototype is used for calculation of graph theory related problems and in the future it will also be used in the field of material design, Lu told the Global Times on Wednesday.

According to the scientist, developing quantum computers is one of the biggest challenges at the forefront of current world technology. During Jiuzhang's research and development, scalable quantum control technology has been developed, providing a technical foundation for the development of fault-tolerant universal quantum computers.

"This paves the way for universal quantum computers, which is estimated by the academic community to be achieved in 10-15 years, said Lu.

In 2021, the team led by Pan developed the 133-photon-based Jiuzhang 2.0 and a 66-qubit programmable superconducting quantum computing system named Zuchongzhi 2.1, making China the only country to achieve a quantum computational advantage in two mainstream technical routes - one via photonics quantum computing technology and the other via superconducting quantum computing technology.

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Australia has invested nearly $1 billion to build a strong quantum ecosystem .

India’s National Quantum Mission is funded at ₹6,003 crore (about $725 million) over eight years, though regulatory and funding challenges persist .

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April 25, 2023

Investment in quantum technology hit a record $2.35bn last year

Billions of dollars have been invested in quantum technology since 2001 with the majority of that investment happening since 2020.

By Ryan Morrison

Quantum technology companies attracted more than $2.35bn in private investment last year, slightly breaking the record set in 2021. A new report by McKinsey suggests this investment could be well placed, as companies deploying quantum stand to gain $1.3trn in value by 2035. To unlock this potential companies have to focus on attracting top talent and scaling up the speed and accuracy of qubits. One expert says public and private sector organisations have a role to play in solving the talent problem.

The McKinsey report suggests four industries are likely to see the earliest impact – automotive, chemicals, financial services and life sciences. This is because these areas have high compute needs and complex problems where quantum advantage is likely to come earlier.

A significant amount of investment in quantum technology is going to start-ups that came into the industry in the past two years. According to McKinsey, 68% of the money put into quantum since 2001 has been invested in the last two years

As of last year, that investment is being spread over fewer new companies. In 2021, 41 quantum technology start-ups were founded, dropping to 19 in 2022 which, according to McKinsey suggests money is going to established start-ups rather than new companies, which could be tied to difficulties in attracting new talent.

The report suggests investors are looking for companies “ready to scale”, with four of the ten largest investment deals since 2001 closed in 2022. Some of these have been worth up to $500m and seven of the ten largest deals in 2022 were worth more than $100m.

Public sector investment is also growing rapidly with the US committing $1.8bn in 2022, the UK will spend £2.5bn over a decade and the EU has $1.2bn for quantum on the table. These are all dwarfed by the estimated $15.2bn public investment in quantum announced by the Chinese government.

Another reason for the redirection of investment towards more established companies could be tied to the slowdown in major scientific breakthroughs, the report authors speculated.

Many of the early-stage quantum technology companies are formed out of university projects and in 2022 the number of published papers on quantum technology declined by 61% between 2020 and 2021. There was another decline, of about 5% between 2022 and 2021. This, they wrote, could be due to challenges becoming harder to solve.

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Need for ‘fault -olerant’ quantum machines

The next stage in quantum computing requires both a ramp-up in qubit numbers and quality to create “fault-tolerant” processors capable of solving real-world problems more accurately and faster than classical computers. The problem is that while qubit numbers have been growing steadily, the quality hasn’t kept pace.

IBM has gone from a 20-qubit processor in 2019 to announcing a 1,000+ qubit machine due for release next year, but it also has a second track of processors with better quality qubits but far fewer actual qubits on each chip.

“In each of the five main approaches to quantum computers, difficult challenges remain,” the authors wrote. This is across all the main types of qubit being developed. For example, in photonics these devices still “leak” photons which results in computation failures and high error rates. In superconducting systems like those used by IBM and Google there are issues scaling up the control and cooling systems to handle potentially thousands of qubits.

These problems have to be solved to unlock the economic value the technology holds, the report authors declared. As economic value depends on speedup, which depends on algorithm complexity, execution time and problem size.

Achieving this scale-up will require top talent and while the talent gap is “significant”, McKinsey suggests it is narrowing in quantum technologies. “Our analysis shows that nearly two-thirds of open jobs in the industry could be filled with new masters’-level graduates in 2022.”

There are still shortages though, with OECD figures showing 717 active job postings last year and 450 master's-level graduates with degrees applicable to those vacancies. This was better than in 2021 when there were 851 job vacancies and just 290 graduates.

Talent isn't evenly spread. Based on density per million inhabitants the EU and UK are top destinations for graduates in quantum technology-relevant fields with 303 per million graduating in the EU in 2020 and 217 per million in the UK.

Ekaterina Almasque, general partner at VC fund OpenOcean, told Tech Monitor the quantum industry was “in its growth phase”, making it extremely challenging to find talent with the necessary skills across a range of technologies and services. “Most individuals working in the industry today were introduced to the concept of quantum computing at a relatively late stage," Almasque says. "While this will change naturally as the industry becomes more established, the private and public sector stakeholders of quantum computing must work together to improve this.”

She adds: “From a European perspective, many pioneering quantum computing businesses are pushing to become world leaders. For Europe to properly establish and maintain a lead in quantum computing, there must be a broad, strategic initiative for early education in quantum computing.”

  • Ryan Morrison writes a new weekly newsletter, Quantum Untangled, looking at the practical applications of quantum computing and interviewing leading figures from the industry. Sign up here.

Read more: How will the UK develop quantum computer regulation?

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India is not too late in quantum computing: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research's Rajamani Vijayaraghavan

Investment in quantum tech has crossed $36 billion globally. It is billed to be the next big thing in tech after semiconductors and artificial intelligence. Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) scientist says India is lagging, but can catch up

April 06, 2023 / 11:23 AM IST

Professor Rajamani Vijayaraghavan

When Professor Rajamani Vijayaraghavan was not present at a quantum tech conference in New Delhi last week, he was missed by his peers.

As scientists, bureaucrats, military officers and startup executives gathered for a conversation on the way forward for India’s quantum technology ambitions, the general feeling was that Vijayaraghavan should have been there.

Quantum computing taps the unique behaviour of quantum physics to solve certain problems that are too complex for traditional computing.

If semiconductor technology was the first giant leap in computing and Artificial Intelligence is the current disruptor, it is probably going to be quantum technology next. Quantum computing, conceived by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman in the early 1980s, was mostly studied in university labs in the US and Europe until the turn of the millennium.

As advances took place, tech behemoths like Google, International Business Machines (IBM) and Intel threw their hat in the ring with billions of dollars in investment. According to an estimate, China has invested $15 billion even as global funding in the technology has topped $36 billion.

At the New Delhi conclave last week, a senior defence official said the wars of the future will be fought on the quantum front. While sizeable quantum computers do not yet exist, the fear among governments and industry is that it will be a Y2K moment once the technology comes to life.

Apart from strategic affairs, quantum tech is also expected to play a central role in areas like drug discovery, financial modelling, weather forecasting and fighting climate change.

Moneycontrol spoke with Professor Vijayaraghavan, a quantum computing scientist at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) who returned to the country a decade ago after studying at the universities of Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley, to take stock of India’s progress in the area.

Edited excerpts:

At the quantum tech conclave in Delhi last week, it seemed as though most Indian quantum start-ups are working on secure communications rather than quantum computing. Why so?

See, in terms of the technology required for doing quantum key distribution (for secure communications), or associated areas like quantum random number generators, it is now fairly well developed internationally. Also, the essential tools and core pieces of hardware and things you need are relatively low-cost and easily available, compared to quantum computing.

If you shift to quantum computing, even if you just take a very basic estimate, it needs about a million dollars just to set up a very basic lab. This was the kind of funding that was given to me when I started in TIFR about 10 years ago, just to have a very basic setup and do simple experiments.

I'm not even talking about the resources you need to develop prototypes and technology. And even this $1 million is an underestimate, because there are other facilities, which were already existing in the institute for device fabrication, clean rooms, and other tools. If I count all of those, then you are talking about a couple of million dollars, at the very least, to get started.

Now, of course, a company could hire these resources from other places. But such facilities don't exist in India, and as of now, even internationally, they are limited, where a company with no infrastructure of their own, but just the idea and expertise could go to a place and say, hey, you know, here is my design, manufacture this for me, and we will put it together.

Experts say that India first missed the bus in taking a lead in semiconductor technology and now even in artificial intelligence. They say it is now or never if we want to be leaders in quantum computing. What is your take?

I broadly agree with it, but let me expand on that. Before something becomes close to technology, there is decades of basic research where they are not even thinking about technology. I started my PhD in the year 2001, i.e. over 22 years back. And that was a turning point when the field of quantum computing was taking off. That was on the back of basic research in quantum computing from the 1980s.

It is absolutely true that if you want to do this, you have to do it now. And with this particular technology, we are not so far behind. Barring a few areas where things have sort of more or less been figured out, we still need several breakthroughs. Even though it looks like IBM has reached so many qubits (a qubit is the basic unit of information in quantum computing) and Google that many, they still don't have a useful quantum computer today. None of these quantum computers that exist anywhere in the world are really useful in the sense that they can replace something to do the work much better.

At how many qubits do you think we can solve real world problems better than existing supercomputers?

It really depends on what you mean by qubits. So there is this notion of physical qubits and logical qubits. The difference is that physical qubits are unstable. Unlike conventional bits in our regular computers, which are extremely stable, and you don't have to worry about them at all, these things are not stable. They actually randomly change their state and give rise to errors. And this happens over a certain timescale, which can be as short as 10s of microseconds or a few milliseconds.

Today’s quantum computers are essentially limited in how long you can use them, or essentially, what is the longest calculation you can run before you can't trust the results of what the computer is outputting. This is a fundamental problem across all quantum computing platforms today. There are some clear paths to solve this, but it is not clear which particular method would win.

And this is where I want to go back to my earlier point that India is not too late. If we invest now, we could create those breakthroughs that can make this technology useful. If enough people start working, and it's not just one or two people in the entire country, then you can hope that these breakthroughs can happen here. And then that will allow us to take a lead in some areas.

In your estimate, how many people are working on quantum computing in India vis-a-vis the US or other countries?

For superconducting qubit research, as of now, there are four people in India. I was the first one who started about 10 years ago, and then two others started maybe about six and four years ago, and one has just joined.

In the US, there are at least 20 or more academic labs, in addition to Google, IBM, or national labs like Fermilab, and I'm not even counting theoretical groups. Many of them have been working for over 20 years or so. And you know, similarly, in Europe, there will be at least 10 to 15 labs just in superconducting quantum computing.

If you look into some of the other subfields like trapped ion quantum computing, it's even smaller.

One of the major issues in advanced research is brain drain. Many of our best researchers still tend to settle abroad. Is more funding alone going to solve this to an extent? What tipped the scales for you to return?

Decisions about moving back to India can be very complicated, you know. There are all kinds of personal and professional reasons, but the point is very simple. You cannot attract someone to come to India to work in a field that requires a certain level of investment by telling them that we will not give it to you.

For me, I always wanted to come back to India and do something if it is possible. And once I finished my PhD, I started looking around and realised that there are lots of labs, which are fairly high-tech and at the cutting edge. Funding seemed to have improved in the previous few years or decade. It was important that I would be able to do the kind of research I was interested in doing rather than compromise. If that had not happened, I would have taken up a job abroad.

Has the funding scenario gotten better since then?

It's now becoming better, at least among the bigger institutes, but it's still quite a challenge. There is no real guarantee that you will get the kind of funding needed for experimental quantum research, and we are trying to solve this problem with the new funding programmes.

There is a reluctance to invest so much money in a new person. The idea of a startup grant is very clear in the West – your offer letter clearly says that you will get $1 million and you have to spend it in the next four to five years… everything is spelt out. We are not able to do that.  You have to keep your fingers crossed and hope for the best.

This actually does pose a barrier to entry because it's not competitive. If I have offers from an Indian institute, where everything is ambiguous, and some other foreign Institute, where everything is clearly spelt out, then it is very difficult to make a decision in favour of the former. Unless, of course, there are personal reasons to be in the country.

It should be a much more streamlined process for the government to disburse funds now as many new advanced research and academic institutes have come up. What are we missing here?

Oh, no. It is not easy at all. The bigger institutes have some advantages in terms of flexibility of using their funds, but it is not easy to get big grants. Currently, the amount that you can get for a standard Department of Science and Technology (DST) project is Rs 10 lakh-50 lakh. That’s the typical range. Special programmes can provide bigger funding but they are rare.

Usually, it is easier to get big funding when a new institute is being built to set up new facilities. From thereon, things get tougher as you reach a steady state. Look, you need investment if you want to work in quantum tech. Of course, one can make a call that ‘Okay, we cannot afford this research, so we will not do it.’ But if you want to, there is no other option, you have to find ways to support this.

A few years back, the DST started a programme called QUEST (Quantum Enabled Science and Technology) where 50 scientists got funded with a combined funding of about Rs 200 crores. It was the first major effort in funding quantum tech research where an individual group could have hoped to get something of the order of Rs. 5 to 10 crore, which is the minimum you need to set up a lab working in quantum tech.

Was this part of the Rs 8,000 crore quantum national mission announced in the 2020 budget?

No, this was a different programme where the first discussions started in 2017 and the money started coming in  2019-2020. Unfortunately, it was right in the middle of the pandemic, when you know, things were shut, and we couldn't spend the money. On top of that, as part of the pandemic-related things, the government made it very difficult to import things.

The National Mission on Quantum Technology and Applications (NMQTA) with a proposed budget of Rs 8,000 crore is expected to launch sometime soon. Probably, you know, in the next few months. We have been working on it.

Can you tell us more about the import policy?

It was introduced in the summer of 2020. This was not a science policy. This was a government procurement policy. You know, on the face of it, it seems like a good idea. They wanted to encourage Indian industry and push for self-reliance. On paper, it sounds great. And it might even work for certain types of government procurement.

They're basically saying that if you're supported by government funds, you have to prioritise Indian-manufactured goods. And the way they implemented it is by saying that if something costs more than Rs 5 lakh and you want to import it, you have to go through a new procedure and get a waiver before you can even float a global tender.

In the beginning, we were surprised, and we said, okay, maybe they just didn't think about scientific procurement. So, in a few months, they will fix it but it didn't happen. It took about six to seven months before some exception was given. But there is no blanket exception given for scientific procurement.

They reduced the number of signatures required by one and made some exceptions. Unfortunately, even there, because of a lack of clarity, every institute has interpreted the rules differently. And we are definitely facing a lot of problems still. In the best-case scenario, we are still wasting about three months just to get approval to import an item.

Does most scientific procurement happen from abroad?

The problem is to assume that there is an Indian option and we are actively choosing not to use it. That is not the case for 99 percent or even more. It is a well-known fact that for scientific high-tech equipment, there is no manufacturing happening in India… there are no companies which exist. But, we have to now prove it with paperwork to get the waiver. Even if we invest Rs 8,000 crore, it won’t work if these kinds of policies are not fixed. We are wasting a bulk of the time just doing this paperwork, and not actually doing research.

It might be more fruitful if you create opportunities in the nation for companies to come together and manufacture at least some of the things in India. But, when you have not had a manufacturing base in a certain technology for decades, how can you start doing that overnight? And in many cases, it might not even make economic sense for a company because it's a niche market.

Is it possible for India to build an indigenous quantum computer?

In today's globalised world, nothing is going to be fully indigenous. For superconducting qubits, you can innovate the design of the chip and make it here, but the lithographic machines and dilution refrigerators have to come from outside.

There is a section which says we can just use quantum computing on the cloud that foreign tech companies provide. Isn’t there a possibility that the use cases of quantum on the cloud will be limited?

As I said earlier, none of the available quantum computers are doing anything useful better than classical computers at present. When it happens in the future, and it will, you might be able to use cloud-based systems for many applications. On one hand, we can continue to be just a leader in the software layer. One could decide that we will develop the best quantum software in the world, but we will never develop any hardware.

The problem really comes when you start talking about strategic applications – whether the cloud company will provide you with the best systems they have access to. That's the fundamental question we have to ask ourselves.

We don’t have a quantum computer, but startups are providing a solution called quantum key distribution (QKD) for secure communications. How do we know it is really secure if they have not been tested against a quantum computing hack?

QKD fundamentally relies on the fact that if somebody tries to interfere, you will know. And the trick in any secret communication is that if two parties can exchange a key without anybody else knowing, then the information you transmit using encoding based on that key is secure. Quantum key distribution is a method where the laws of physics guarantee that the key you have exchanged has not been intercepted by anybody else. Because the moment somebody intercepts, you will know and you will discard that key. It cannot be broken by even a quantum computer. So you don't need to test it against a quantum computer.

A bureaucrat was saying that enterprises are concerned that they might be sold classical computing solutions in the garb of quantum tech. So the government is trying to bring a quantum certification programme. Would it have the bandwidth to do such accreditation?

You have to look at this slightly differently. There are things in quantum which are impossible in classical. So if whatever you're purchasing is actually carrying out that task, it cannot do it the classical way. And if there are applications where both classical and quantum can do that, then it is unclear why you would bother unless there is a cost advantage or a performance advantage for the quantum solution.

As a business or an enterprise that wants some problem solved, you will put the problem statement, and the quantum company will say this is the solution. So, why do you care what is inside? The bureaucrat was probably referring to quantum communication systems where you want some central body to verify that the system is really secure and meets certain standards. I believe the government is setting up such bodies for various quantum technologies.

Deepsekhar Choudhury Deepsekhar covers tech and startups at Moneycontrol. Tweets at @deepsekharc

Finland operationalized its first 5-qubit quantum computer in collaboration with IQM, aiming for scalable, accessible quantum systems .

Title:

Content: Satyam Priyadarshy

Rajesh Mehta

Governments, venture capitalists, and private companies have invested billions of dollars in quantum computing in the last 10 years. Recently, at the Puzzle X conference held in Barcelona, it was evident that Europe is preparing to take on the leadership role to push the boundaries of quantum computing ecosystem. So, what is quantum computing?

Bits to Qubits

In simple words, quantum computing combines the fields of quantum mechanics and computer science. It moves us beyond Bits to Qubits. In traditional computer science, the information is stored and manipulated using bits that have two discrete states, 0 and 1, while in the quantum computing world, Qubits can represent both states at the same time, thus allowing for a high degree of parallelism, enabling by phenomena of “interference, superposition, and entanglement.”

Such parallelism allows quantum computers to tackle computational challenges that become a limiting factor for traditional computers.

Wide applications

Many companies in the quantum computing field are engaged in solving complex problems that could significantly impact the fields of drug development, material design, energy transition, finance, security, and defense.

All nations must address various aspects of the quantum computing ecosystem sooner than later due to China’s quantum computing activities.

The National Quantum Mission (NQM) was approved by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on April 19, 2023.

With a budget of ₹6,003 crore over eight years, it aims to create, develop, and nurture the quantum technology ecosystem in the country.

The goal of the mission is to develop intermediate-scale quantum computers with 50-1,000 physical qubits in various platforms like superconducting and photonic technology. Satellite-based secure quantum communications between ground stations over a range of 2,000 km within India, long-distance secure quantum communications with other countries, inter-city quantum key distribution over 2,000 km, as well as multi-node quantum networks with quantum memories, are among the other deliverables. The technology is expected to break ground in communications, cryptography, intelligence, fossil fuel exploration, space research, and drug design.

As we step into 2024, an increased set of activities to solve complex challenges will be addressed by combining the tools of Artificial Intelligence and Quantum computing.

Priyadarshy is a pioneer in the fields of Quantum Mechanics, Data Science, Big Data and Emerging Technologies; Mehta is an International Consultant in the field of Market Entry, Innovation and Public Policy

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Lessons learned include the infancy of practical quantum systems, the need for continued investment, and a significant talent gap, with collaboration between companies and governments urged to address workforce shortages [f202