The International Race To Lead In Quantum Technology

Uploaded on 2025-01-15 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Quantum Computing, TECHNOLOGY--Developments, FREE TO VIEW

Over the last decade, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has increasingly developed, got public attention and critical scrutiny, another important technology has been developing without public attention. Now, Quantum Computing aims to use operations based on quantum mechanics to crack computational problems that were thought to be impossible to solve.

A Quantum Computer is a computer that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena. On small scales, physical matter exhibits properties of both particles and waves, and Quantum Computing leverages this behaviour using specialised hardware.

Classical physics cannot explain the operation of these quantum devices, and a scalable Quantum Computer could perform some calculations much faster than modern computers. The breakthroughs needed to commercialise quantum technology will not come from top-down directives or rigid structures. They will come from small teams of innovators pushing boundaries, supported by a vibrant ecosystem of startups, universities, and investors.
Quantum Computing will have profound effects on security and the global economy in the near future.

In the last decade and a half the US and other technology advanced countries have joined the race for leadership in quantum information science and technology, which includes quantum computing, quantum communications, and quantum sensing.

In the last 10 years, governments in 20 countries have announced investments in quantum development totalling more than $40 billion worldwide; China alone has committed to spend $15.3 billion over five years.

In 2016, China said that the development of quantum technologies as a national priority and it has created advanced hubs for production.

In 2018 the US launched the National Quantum Initiative, legislation aimed at maintaining the country’s technological and scientific lead in quantum information and its applications.

The US Government has also announced $3.7 billion in unclassified funding, plus more funding for defence research and development. In addition to government-led initiatives, multiple research and development efforts are underway in the private sector and academia.

Although these investments are still lower than AI international funding, the rise of quantum technology has already begun to change international policy.

In 2019, the United States announced a bilateral “statement on quantum cooperation” with Japan, which the US Government strengthened in 2023. And in 2024, Washington established a multilateral initiative called the Quantum Development Group to coordinate strategies for advancing and managing the new technology. The US has also discussed quantum issues within various economic and security forums, including AUKUS, the trilateral defence pact amongst Australia, the UK, as well as the 'Quad', a security dialogue, with Australia, India and Japan.

To date, the advent of quantum technology has been perceived largely as a national security issue. However, since the 1990s, researchers have recognised that one of the greatest threats posed by a powerful quantum computer is its potential as a code-breaking tool, capable of penetrating the encryption used by the most advanced communication systems and digital networks around the world today.

This concern has spurred the US Government to develop and advocate for the adoption of quantum-resistant cryptography, strengthen export controls on quantum technology and related products, and build action-oriented partnerships with industry, academia, and local governments. But the focus on code breaking has led policymakers to ignore other important applications of quantum technology.

In fact, before quantum machines are able to crack advanced encryption systems, a capability that will require enormous computational power even after the technology is developed, they could have a transformational effect in many sectors of the economy, including energy and pharmaceuticals.

Effectively harnessed, quantum technologies could spur innovation, scientific discovery, economic growth, and opportunity. In sheer human impact, some of the breakthroughs that could be unlocked by quantum machines rival those that are now projected to come from AI. For this reason, it is especially important that the technology is developed in open societies, with clear guardrails in place to ensure that it is used for benevolent purposes.

Winning the quantum race will not be easy. China has already taken the lead in some areas such as quantum communications, and in the coming years, focused American innovation and leadership will be critical to maintain US competitiveness. The United States and its international partners will need to commit far more resources to bring their quantum projects to fruition, and they will have to develop quantum industries and a strong quantum supply chain to support these projects.

If the United States and its allies fail to make these efforts a central strategic goal and policymaking priority, they could lose diplomatic influence, military might, and the ability to provide oversight of a powerful new technology. They could also miss out on the chance to forge a new path for economic and societal progress.

The concept of a quantum computer was first proposed by the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman in 1981. Feynman came of age during the dawn of quantum mechanics, when scientists began to recognise that atoms, electrons, light, and other sub-nanoscale objects, building blocks for everything in the universe, obey fundamentally different rules than the objects of everyday life. Feynman’s insight was that to truly understand the quantum mechanical world, and the general workings of the universe itself, it would be necessary to build a computer that operates according to the same laws. In the more than four decades since, computers following the “classical” design have transformed the world.

Today, pocket-sized mobile phones today are a million times as powerful as the bulky desktop personal computers of the 1980s.

Moore’s law, the prediction that the number of transistors on a computer chip would double every two years, has continued to broadly hold true in the semiconductor industry, despite multiple predictions of its demise. And the best supercomputers today can handle a quintillion, that is, a billion billion, operations per second. Yet as this revolution continues to mature, it has become increasingly clear that some computations are and will remain beyond even the best classical computers.This is because existing computer technologies are constrained by the basic premise on which they operate. All forms of classical computing, whether an abacus, a personal laptop, or a high-performance cluster of machines in a national security facility, follow Boolean logic. In this system, the basic unit of information is a bit, which is an object that assumes one of two states, conventionally referred to as 0 or 1.

Although this system has proved highly efficient for many kinds of calculations, it cannot perform those of exceeding complexity, such as factoring a thousand-digit number, calculating the reaction dynamics of a molecule with hundreds of atoms, or solving certain kinds of optimisation problems that are common in many fields.

In contrast, by harnessing quantum mechanics, quantum computing does not have the same constraints. A lesson of quantum physics, one that is startling and counter-intuitive, is that particles can exist in a simultaneous combination of multiple states. Accordingly, instead of bits, with their either-or operation, quantum computing uses a quantum bit, or qubit, which is a system that can be simultaneously in states 0 and 1. This both-at-once ability, known as superposition, conveys an enormous computational advantage, one that increases when more qubits are working together.

Whereas a classical computer must process one state after another sequentially, a quantum computer can explore many possibilities in parallel.

Think of trying to find the correct path through a maze: a classical computer has to try each path one by one; a quantum computer can explore multiple paths simultaneously, making it orders of magnitude faster for certain tasks. It is important to note that contrary to popular simplification, a quantum computer is not simply an enormous set of classical computers working in parallel.

Although there are exponentially many possible answers that can be explored through a quantum processor, only one combination can be measured in the end. Deriving a solution from a quantum computer thus requires clever programming that amplifies the correct answer. A major challenge is figuring out how to build quantum processors that are large and stable enough to produce consistent results for meaningful problems.

Such processors tend to be extremely sensitive to their environment and can be easily affected by changes in temperature, vibrations, and other disturbances, which can lead to a variety of errors in the system.

Since computational fidelity relies on qubits maintaining coherence, researchers are investing heavily in methods to improve qubit quality, including new designs, chip-fabrication processes, and techniques to correct for qubit error. Currently, there is a wide array of approaches to designing qubits, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. In principle, any quantum mechanical system, atoms, molecules, ions, photons, could be fashioned into a qubit. In practice, factors such as manufacturability, controllability, performance, and computational speed dictate the most viable paths.

Today’s leading efforts include superconducting, neutral atom, photonic, and ion trap qubits. It is unclear at this early stage which, if any, will turn out to be successful. Beyond building the processor, other challenges include how to package the qubits, transmit their signals, and run applications. Researchers must use cryogenic refrigerators, which can cool superconducting qubits to within thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, to provide an ultracold, dark, and quiet environment for operation. Expertise across these highly specialised components comes from disparate sources in many countries. In the US there are currently there are various Quantum computing firms, including Amazon, Google, IBM, and QuEra, that are aiming to integrate components into a final product.

In short, quantum computing today faces a multitude of challenges and unknowns, and continued development will require a host of engineering innovations. What is clear is that for any of the approaches to succeed, they must be reliable, scalable, and cost-effective.

The race to arrive at a full-scale quantum computer is driven by several motives. Most fundamentally, quantum computing promises to provide answers to problems previously thought unsolvable, puzzles that would take eons for the world’s best classical computers to crack. The most well-known problem of this kind is integer factorisation, or breaking down a number as a product of several smaller numbers: even the fastest supercomputers are unable to factor very large numbers.

This has meant that the most advanced forms of cryptography, which are based on factorisation, cannot now be broken. But quantum computers may change that.

Quantum computers will create extraordinary opportunities for those organisations and nations able to develop and take advantage of them. They will also pose new risks, including the potential for abuse or misuse, and possible shocks to the world order.

But if these dangers can be managed, the potential of quantum computing to accelerate human progress and build a better future could be incredible.

James Manyika / LinkedIn | RealClearDeefense | ABC

Image: sasha85ru

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