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.

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 hasnt 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.

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In a new study, scientists have observed long-lived excitons in a topological material, opening intriguing new research directions for optoelectronics and quantum computing.

Excitons are charge-neutral quasiparticles created when light is absorbed by a semiconductor. Consisting of an excited electron coupled to a lower-energy electron vacancy or hole, an exciton is typically short-lived, surviving only until the electron and hole recombine, which limits its usefulness in applications.

If we want to make progress in quantum computing and create more sustainable electronics, we need longer exciton lifetimes and new ways of transferring information that dont rely on the charge of electrons, said Alessandra Lanzara, who led the study. Lanzara is a senior faculty scientist at the Department of Energys Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and a UC Berkeley physics professor. Here were leveraging topological material properties to make an exciton that is long lived and very robust to disorder.

In a topological insulator, electrons can only move on the surface. By creating an exciton in such a material, the researchers hoped to achieve a state in which an electron trapped on the surface was coupled to a hole that remained confined in the bulk. Such a state would be spatially indirect extending from the surface into the bulk and could retain the special spin properties inherent to topological surface states.

If we want to make progress in quantum computing and create more sustainable electronics, we need longer exciton lifetimes and new ways of transferring information that dont rely on the charge of electrons.

Alessandra Lanzara

The team used a state-of-the-art technique that Lanzara helped pioneer, known as time-, spin-, and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, which uses ultrafast pulses of light to probe the properties of electrons in a material. They worked with bismuth telluride, a well-studied topological insulator that offered the precise properties they needed: an electronic state combining the topological surface characteristics with those of the insulating bulk.

We knew that bismuth telluride had the right electronic structure to support a spatially indirect exciton, but finding the right experimental conditions took hundreds of hours, said Lanzara. It was a huge joy for everyone when we saw the excitonic state we were looking for.

The team studied the formation of the excitonic state and characterized its interaction with other charge carriers in the material. These observations already constituted a breakthrough, but the team went a step further by also measuring the states spin character and demonstrating the persistence of the topological materials strong spin polarization in the excitonic state.

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Jones brings leading expertise in computational materials modelling that is crucial in developing quantum algorithms

LONDON, April 26, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Phasecraft, the quantum algorithms company, announced today that it has appointed Dr. Glenn Jones as Principal Quantum Scientist. As Phasecraft gets closer to breakthroughs and useful applications of quantum computing like materials modelling, Jones will play a crucial role in making this a practical reality.

Jones joins Phasecraft with over 20 years of academic and industrial experience in materials modelling. He most recently served as the Research Manager at Johnson Matthey Technology Centre (JMTC), where he led the Physical and Chemical Modelling group. His responsibilities extended beyond in-house materials modelling, covering various external collaborations and programs as well. These initiatives included cloud high-performance computing (HPC), grants from Innovate UK for the application of quantum computing in materials science, EU projects focused on data and interoperability, as well as industrial sponsorship on a number of PhD research projects at universities, aimed at fostering talent and expanding capabilities.

Jones also initiated JMTC's new modelling laboratory in South Africa, where he was Research Manager until he returned to the UK in 2017 to a broader role managing JMTC physical and chemical core-science modelling efforts.

"We are thrilled to welcome Glenn to the Phasecraft team," said Toby Cubitt, Co-Founder and Director of Phasecraft. "With his world-renowned expertise in computational materials modelling, Glenn will be a key player in the development of quantum algorithms that can tackle tasks in this domain, which are currently impossible for classical computers. His addition will be invaluable as we continue to push the boundaries of quantum computing and strive to make it a practical reality."

Jones' addition to the team comes as Phasecraft continues to lead fundamental breakthroughs in quantum science and the development of algorithms reducing the timescale for quantum advantage in several critical areas. Beyond developing algorithms that will be able to scale to larger quantum computers, the Phasecraft team is also focused on continuing to build practically relevant features into their models so that they more accurately represent real-world systems.

"Phasecraft's novel algorithm approach is accelerating the pace at which we can expect to see practical applications for quantum computing," says Jones. "I am excited to work with this world-class team and to bring quantum computing to industrial application and open a new paradigm on how we solve these important problems."

Jones obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge, after which he joined the Centre for Atomic Scale Materials Design (CAMD) at the Technical University of Denmark as a Postdoctoral researcher. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and was awarded a Royal Society Industrial Fellowship in 2010. He is currently based in both London and Bristol.

As the quantum computing industry is rapidly growing, the need for top talent is essential in this specialised field. Phasecraft is aggressively hiring Quantum Algorithm Engineers, Quantum Software Researchers and interns in 2023.

To learn more about Phasecraft's scientific research, business partnerships, career opportunities, and fellowships, please visit phasecraft.io.

About Phasecraft Phasecraft is the quantum algorithms company. We're building the mathematical foundations for quantum computing applications that solve real-world problems.

Our team brings together many of the world's leading quantum scientists, including founders Toby Cubitt, Ashley Montanaro, and John Morton, as well as a growing international network of renowned experts including Andrew Childs and Maris Ozols.

Through our partnerships with Google, IBM, and Rigetti we enjoy unprecedented access to today's best quantum computers, which provides us with unique opportunities to develop foundational IP, inform the development of next-generation quantum hardware, and accelerate commercialization of high-value breakthroughs.

We are always looking for talented research scientists and partners interested in joining us on the front lines of quantum computing. To learn more about our scientific research, business partnerships, career opportunities, and fellowships, please visit phasecraft.io.

Media Contact

Doug Freeman, Jones-Dilworth, Inc., 5128267674, doug@jones-dilworth.com

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China recently reconstituted its Ministry of Science and Technology and created a powerful Central Science and Technology Commission in order to ensure that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has more direct oversight over the ministry. This change, which was recommended by the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China, recognizes that technology competition with the United States requires direct supervision from the highest level of the party.

This reorganization was carried out during the Two Sessions, annual meetings of National Peoples Congress (NPC) and Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) held in Beijing in March of this year. This is where policy direction of the CCP becomes clear as thousands of delegates ratify institutional and personnel changes, legislate, and endorse government budgets in rather ceremonial but important meetings. Dissent is hardly allowed.

The result of endorsing the dominant role of the CCP over Chinas technology development in these sessions implies the importance Chinas leaders place on the sector. During the Two Sessions, Xi indicated that enhancing integrated national strategies and strategic capabilities is key to Chinas aim of becoming a global power. In this, the development of key strategic technologies plays a vital and consequent role.

By 2049, China aims to emerge as a global leader in three strategic technologies, identified by President Xi Jinping as critical for Chinas national rejuvenation: space, AI, and quantum communications and computing.

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In 2019, a white paper on defense, titled Chinas National Defense in the New Era, issued by the State Council, highlighted the critical importance of competing in key strategic technologies to emerge as a great power. Since then, these technologies have been described as Chinas new infrastructure or critical infrastructure, to ensure China continues its national rejuvenation and adds to its great power advantage vis--vis the United States.

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This is not entirely new; science and technology development was identified as key for China to emerge as a great power as per the Comprehensive National Power (CNP) concept developed under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. As Michael Pillsbury noted back in 2000, CNP (zonghe guoli) refers to the combined overall conditions and strengths of a country in numerous areas, of which science and technology are perhaps amongst the top.

Given the international environment framed by the State Council as competitive, assuming leadership in these key strategic technologies has been identified as vital. Various strategies have been developed to advance Chinas progress, including Chinas innovation strategy, as well as Made in China 2025 strategy. To support the development of strategic technologies, China made important changes to its Politburo and Central Committee during the 20th Party Congress last year as I have argued previously.

So where is China today in terms of these three key strategic technologies?

Space

China is a great power in space with its civilian programs. The countrys ambitious goals reflect this: China aims to establish a permanent base on the Moon by 2036, demonstrate a gigawatt-level power generation capability via its space-based solar power project by 2050, conduct a human Mars mission between 2033-2049, and an asteroid exploration mission by 2025.

China is also the only nation with its own independent Low Earth Orbit (LEO) space station, the Tiangong. Recently, China announced that they had successfully tested a 100 percent regeneration of oxygen supplies onboard the Tiangong space station. Bian Qiang, the director of the environmental control and life-support engineering office under the Astronaut Center of China, explained its significance, as paraphrased by China Daily: the development reflects a fundamental transformation of the environmental control and life-support system for Chinas manned spacecraft from replenishment to regeneration. More importantly, the system was able to regenerate 95 percent of its own water as well, which meant resupply to the space station from the ground via Chinas Tianzhou cargo spacecraft would be reduced by 6 tonnes a year.

This development will also help China understand better how to develop a regenerative system for the Moon, since they have plans for a crewed mission to the Moon after 2036 and are looking to extract resources on the Moon like Helium 3 and water-ice.

China has its own independent BeiDou navigation system comprising 35 satellites; nearly 250 military satellites for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting; as well as both kinetic and non-kinetic ASAT capabilities.

In Chinas 2021 white paper on its space activities, planetary defense was identified as a key mission. Chinas planetary defense mission also includes the tracking of asteroids and meteorites and developing deflection technologies. Consequently, China has identified asteroid2019 VL5, which is about 108 feet (33 meters)in diameter andorbits the Sun every 365 days, as the destination of a planetary defense mission, wherein China will launch both an observer and an impactor spacecraft in 2025. While one spacecraft will study the asteroid, the other spacecraft will collide with the asteroid to deflect it.

Wu Weiren, one of the chief scientists and architects of Chinas space program, to include its lunar mission, explained that the impactor spacecraft will aim to deflect the asteroid 1 or 2 inches, which might increase to a distance of 620 miles in three months. The dual nature application is rather obvious; used for military purposes, the same technology can crash into satellites and deflect them.

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China is constructing a deep-space observation facility in southwest Chinas Chongqing Municipality, which includes 25 radars with a 30-meter aperture, to detect asteroids over 10 million kilometers away. Called China Fuyan, this far-reaching radar system will build Chinas planetary defense as well as space traffic management capabilities.

Artificial Intelligence

In 2021, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology issued a white paper on Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, which highlights the development of AI as a critical enabler of economic development. Envisioned AI-powered technologies include a social credit system, facial recognition tech, self-driving cars, autonomous drones and airplanes, additive manufacturing, and even orbital platforms in space that can make decisions on who is an adversary based on highly intelligent generative AI. China is projected to spend around $14.7 billion in AI this year, about 10 percent of the global investment. By 2026, that figure estimated to reach about $26 billion.

The combination of AI with military technologies can add a lethal edge to China. Two examples stand out; one in space and the other underwater.

China recently announced the development of AI-enabled satellites that can avoid space debris. Called the New Generation of Artificial Intelligence 2022 Major Program, supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, this project was launched by the State Key Laboratory of Astronautic Dynamics (ADL), affiliated with the Xian Satellite Control Center in Northwest Chinas Shaanxi Province.

According to Li Hengnian, director of the ADL, We will take the implementation of the project as an opportunity to actively align national strategic needs and cooperate with domestic competitive units to provide strong technical support for strengthening the nations space traffic management and contributing to Chinas building of a space power. The framing is important to notice here: Space traffic management is viewed from a space-power perspective.

Another project that China is working on that is enabled by AI is an orbital platform consisting of CubeSats. This platform, which will be enabled by AI decision making, can be utilized to defend against attacks on Chinese space assets. Besides defense, such a platform can be used for in orbit refueling and maintenance as well. AI can be utilized to direct mission planning, timing, and the release of CubeSats that could have non-kinetic ASAT technologies.

By 2025, China plans to develop a Jilin-1 constellation of 130 satellites that will be AI enabled to deflect U.S. ASAT capabilities. The Jilin-1 project is being developed by ChineseAcademy of Sciences (CAS) State Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics, and Physics as part of China Geospatial-Intelligence Satellite Telescope (CGST) developed with a funding of $375 million. Chinese company Head Aerospace is involved with the project. Seventy of the 138 satellites are already in orbit. With help from the Peoples Liberation Army Strategic Support Force (PLASSF), the Jilin satellites are enabled by AI to accurately track down moving objects that can be utilized for precision intelligence gathering and targeting. It covers certain areas of Earth between 17 and 20 times each day. AI is being used to monitor and precisely guess where a target is, in case a target becomes inaccessible.

AI is also enabling unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) built by China that can identify and target adversary submarines. Exercises conducted by China in the Taiwan Strait saw the utilization of UUVs 30 feet undersea that changed course, maneuvered and attacked a dummy submarine by utilizing AI decision cycles. Onboard sonars and sensors collected data that was then utilized by AI to make a decision to attack. A strategic mapping of these technologies becomes vital amid conflict escalation in the Taiwan Strait.

Recently, Chinas newly re-constituted Ministry for Science and Technology and the National Natural Science Foundation of China established the Artificial Intelligence for Science project amid given the competition with the United States for leadership in these technologies. The idea is to utilize AI for a cumulative integration strategy as is witnessed in the additive power of AI in space and underwater, and thereby build CNP.

AI has been identified as a key technology and industry in Chinas Made in China 2025 and innovation strategy. China aims to become the global leader in AI by 2030, seven years from the reconstitution of its science and technology institutional structure.

As per reports, China is edging ahead of the United States in AI technology thanks to these efforts. China already publishes the world largest number of peer reviewed papers in AI that result in patents.

Quantum Communications and Computing

China showcased to the world its lead in quantum communications in 2017, when Chinese scientists beamed entangled photons from the worlds first quantum communication satellite, Micius, that was launched in 2016.

In June 2020, in a paper published in Nature, Pan Jianwei, member of the National Committee of the CPPCC, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and executive vice president of the University of Science and Technology of China, showcased a secure method of quantum messaging by utilizing Micius, which moved China closer to the goal of unhackable communication capability.

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There are plans afoot to develop a quantum communication network, as per Pan. This network will utilize encryption methods and ground stations, supported by quantum computing. Pan stated, We are cooperating with the National Space Science Center to develop a medium-high orbit satellite. In the future, the combination of high-orbit satellites and low-orbit satellites will build a wide-area quantum communication network.

It was Pans team that launched the first quantum satellite for China in 2016. Pan gives China about 15 years (2038) to realize fully functional quantum computing and communications, which will depend on quantum error correction. Given that quantum communication and computing has been recognized as key critical infrastructure by China, the likelihood of realizing this is high.

The combination of space, AI, and quantum computing and communications is developing China into a great technology power. Xi, at the 20th Party Congress, stated that the development of key strategic technologies will help China emerge as the leading nation in international relations in the 21st century and will foster new growth engines. This is a continuation in the grand strategic thinking of the studies on CNP commissioned by Deng Xiaoping, which identified the development of science and technology as a key factor in Chinas emergence as a great power, and superseding the United States by the 2020s.

A competition is underway for relative power, if not absolute power, between a rising China and a declining United States. This will have direct strategic implications for how the international order is constituted in the long run. Chinas progress in the three strategic technologies of space, AI, and quantum makes it evident that they are on the path to global preeminence.

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New Delhi: The National Quantum Mission approved by the Union cabinet last week is a venture into the unknown, and not just because quantum computing is still a fledgling field of study. The clich is also true of the very science that the quest for quantum computers is based on.

Quantum mechanics is a mysterious world where a particle can exist in two states at once, or when a cat, famously named after Erwin Schrdinger, is both alive and dead (or neither) provided you dont look at it, because when you do, it will definitely be dead.

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics, the legendary American physicist Richard Feynman said at Cornell Universitys Messenger Lectures in 1964. The following year, he would win the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on quantum mechanics.

From quantum mechanics emerged the quest for quantum computers a couple of decades later, seeking to harness the strange properties of nature at atomic levels. Such computers, in theory, would be several times faster than traditional computers.

In fact, it was none other than Feynman who, in 1981, proposed the idea of finding a computer simulation of physics. The real use of it would be with quantum mechanics Nature isnt classical and if you want to make a simulation of nature, youd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly its a wonderful problem, because it doesnt look so easy, he said at a conference organised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IBM.

Quantum computing is one of the four domains for which thematic hubs will be set up in top academic and national research and development institutes under the National Quantum Mission approved last week with a budget of 6,000 crore. The other three domains are quantum communication, which seeks to transmit information that would be difficult to eavesdrop on; quantum sensing and metrology, or the use of quantum phenomena to make precise measurements; and quantum materials and devices, such materials being solids with exotic properties.

Quantum technology is a field where research still has miles to go, especially as far as building a "usable" quantum computer is concerned. However, some key milestones have been reached, particularly over the last couple of decades.

Classical physics cannot explain much of the behaviour of matter and energy at subatomic levels, but can still explain much of the physical world. Quantum mechanics studies matter at the atomic and subatomic levels, where the laws of classical physics cease to apply.

In Feynmans words, Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.

The physicist said this in a lecture delivered at the California Institute of Technology. You can view it on the universitys website.

Quantum mechanics is all about weird concepts: wave-particle duality, a property that allows matter and energy, such as light, to behave both as a wave and as a stream of particles; superposition, when an object exists in multiple possible states at the same time; and entanglement, when two or more particles or photons can exist in a shared state, both behaving the same way, even if they are far apart. The 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics honoured Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for their work on superposition.

While the benefits of quantum mechanics have engaged scientists for generations, these depend on the problem that one aims to address, said Apoorva Patel, convener of the Quantum Technology Initiative at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

Quantum physics was invented because certain physical phenomena could not be explained at all by classical theories. The practical advantage can be proven when such phenomena are at the core of the problems to be tackled, he said, citing the examples of superposition and entanglement among others.

Of course, classical theories explain many physical phenomena, and when that is the case, quantum technology will hardly offer any advantage in addressing them, Patel said.

The challenge is that quantum dynamics is highly fragile. Environmental disturbances rapidly destroy quantum signals. So, the quantum effects can be observed only in highly protected and cooperative settings. They do not survive in hostile situations. The need to construct a carefully protected setting is what makes quantum technology expensive, Patel said.

As such, there will be many situations in which classical technology will be more robust, cheaper and efficient. Quantum technology, therefore, will be useful only in special-purpose-devices, he said.

It requires in-depth knowledge of quantum physics to figure out what such devices would be. The rest is all hype, Patel said.

Special-purpose-devices can do many useful things. One obvious answer is that the first rewards will come in the development of high-precision sensors and measuring instruments, which will definitely bring many benefits to society. The real challenges are all in the design of such systems and not in their usage. That is where the investment must be made. Whether the government and industry will pay attention to this or not is a different story, he said.

High-precision sensors and measuring instruments would come under the domain of quantum sensing and metrology. Such sensors are vital to devices such as atomic clocks, platforms used in the making of quantum computers, and various areas of science that require high precision.

A quantum computer would be superior to classical ones in several aspects, key among them being processing speed and stronger encryption of information. A classical computer stores information in terms of bits, which are in the form of combinations of 0s and 1s. A quantum computer, on the other hand, would store information in quantum bits, or qubits. A qubit can be both 0 and 1 at the same time, and because such information can probabilistically exist in multiple forms simultaneously, the information stored rises exponentially with the number of qubits.

In quantum communication, the nature of cryptography would make eavesdropping impossible without being detected. A widely studied method is to transmit a quantum key via a series of photons. If anyone were to eavesdrop on the communication, some of the properties of the key would be altered just like Schrdingers cat would be dead once observed and so the sender of the information would know there has been a breach.

The challenges remain the fragility of quantum states and the design of such systems. At the heart of a quantum computer are its qubits, created as an array of atoms of a suitable element or isotope. These are levitated in free space in a vacuum environment. Storing and manipulating information in this exotic form requires sophisticated control of the underlying materials, Princeton University scientists said in a paper in Science in 2021, and called on materials scientists to take up the challenge of developing hardware for quantum computing.

While a usable quantum computer is still far away, the quest has progressed since Feynmans observations in 1981.

In 1985, Oxford researcher David Deutsch published a theoretical paper describing a universal quantum computer. What provoked greater interest, however, was an algorithm proposed in 1994 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Peter Shor, then working for American telecommunication giant, AT&T.

Shor proposed a method using entanglement of qubits and superposition to find the prime factors of an integer. This was potentially important because finding factors of large numbers is so difficult that many encryption systems exploit this difficulty. Shors idea led to a storm of research, but what he proposed in theory proved hard to achieve.

No other algorithms to rival the potential of Shors were found. Despite disappointment, momentum was not lost and the field branched into different directions, Nature observed in an editorial, 40 years of quantum computing, in January 2022.

During the current century, universities and companies have made further strides. According to Washington University, the record for the highest number of qubits is currently 72, on a chip developed by Google. In 2017, Microsoft released Q#, a language for quantum algorithms. And in January of 2019, IBM announced one of the first commercial quantum computers.

Also in 2019, Google announced that its collaborators at the University of California, Santa Barbara, had achieved quantum supremacy, the stage at which a quantum computer performs tasks that a classical computer cannot. The universitys researchers claimed to have developed a processor that took 200 seconds to do a calculation that would have taken a classical computer 10,000 years. The claim was, however, disputed by IBM.

Most existing quantum computers use metal-insulator-metal sandwiches that are turned into superconducting qubits, by being lowered to extremely low temperatures, a write-up on the US department of energy website notes. But, scientists routinely using quantum computers to answer scientific questions is a long way off, it added.

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