Quantum supremacy – the ability to demonstrate that a quantum device can solve a problem much faster than a regular computer can – is being pursued by governments and private sector companies alike. Intel, Microsoft, Google and Chinese companies Alibaba and Baidu - are among those investing in quantum information science.
When Google announced last fall that it had achieved quantum supremacy by performing a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken an estimated 10K years for a normal computer, it caused quite a stir, primarily from competitors saying what Google had accomplished wasn’t really that big of a deal.
The Cipher Brief wanted to know what the US Government is doing to invest in quantum computing and how they are approaching the race for quantum supremacy, so we started by talking with Jake Taylor, Assistant Director for Quantum at the Office of Science and Technology Policy at The White House. Taylor leads all of the quantum R&D and policy efforts at the White House.
The Cipher Brief: What are one or two critical facts that you think Americans should understand about the development of quantum computing?
Taylor: That's a great question. The first thing is that quantum computing is a key part of a larger field called quantum information science. It explores how quantum mechanics and the fundamental laws of nature enable new technologies, particularly information technologies. It's been going on for a very long time as a field, about 30 years now, and it has had a sustained long-term investment from the federal government to try and make efficient and effective progress in the sciences. But in the last five years, the industrial engagement and investment in this space has seen a dramatic change. And that is because it is moving from a pure scientific exploration of opportunities to the creation of a new technological base.
To give you context about what I mean by ‘technology base’, think back to 1947 and the invention of the atomic clock. Atomic clocks are a technological base component which enables better telecommunications, enables global navigation systems and enables things like observing the black hole event horizon through the event horizon telescope which required atomic clock-based synchronization. So, it's a base technology that has enabled other incredible things.
Jake Taylor, Asst. Dir. Quantum Information Science, Office of Science and Technology Policy, White House
In terms of quantum, if I look at the two most important things to understand: 1) it's been going on for a long time. It's using fundamental science and fundamental laws of nature to improve what we can do with information technology. And 2), we're getting to a turning point in which the industrial opportunities are sufficiently large that big and small players need to start investing.
The Cipher Brief: Is the race for ‘dominance’ in quantum, a zero-sum game?
Taylor: I generally prefer to push back against a race narrative. I say that because there's a tremendous amount of exploration still to be done. We look at the frontiers of the quantum information science domain as largely underexplored or unexplored. So, at the present time, there is a series of explorations accelerating across the world, but it's not like a space race. This is why I push back on it. It's not that there's a clear technological goal that requires an engineering solution to achieve.
And the other key point is that when you're exploring and discovering new science and new technological applications and opportunities, we see this as an overall benefit to the economy. And that means explicitly when you get productivity improvements or other growth improvements, it's not zero sum. We can gain, as can our competitors and allies around the world.
The Cipher Brief: How significant do you think Google's announcement last October was that they had achieved quantum supremacy?
Taylor: It's important because if you look at the details of what they've done, it demonstrates that they're able to build a reasonably reliable device with many different components which work together and that the engineering models that we use to understand these systems work. If you can't understand your engineering models, you can't build a system. And this experiment really demonstrates the engineering models worked. Was it a technological transition point? We generally don't see it that way.
We see it as a tremendous success of a science experiment done at a company - part of the American innovation ecosystem working at its best. This was an effort begun more than 20 years ago at NIST. It then moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara with John Martinis' move there. It was then supported by the government through a series of funding efforts. Google purchased many portions of that, along with many members of the team with their own investments. The final effort was the collaboration between key scientists around the world, including many of them from the government, along with Google's efforts. And it's the science result about the fundamental nature of computation, but it also showcases an engineering pathway. So, I think it's important.
The Cipher Brief: What do you see as the most interesting developments occurring right now in quantum?
Taylor: There are things that grab the headlines and I think those are interesting. But then, there are some things that don't grab the headlines, which for me are just as interesting. In sensing in particular, there are changes that have been happening over the last 10 years. If you don't know what sensing is, it is measuring stuff; magnetic fields that you do in an MRI, measuring precise signals from clocks so you can know where you are, looking at accelerations from gravity or from anomalies, and gravity like if you have a big oil repository somewhere and you’re measuring light and photons.
There's been a tremendous change in how and what we can measure, and this is going to have long-term ramifications that are not yet fully understood. Some of the changes, for example include the ability to monitor magnetic fields and temperatures at very small scales and biological relevant systems; the creation of very low fueled MRI systems which allow battlefield medicine or medicine at the scene of an accident; the development of new calibration systems.
So, the world adopted what's called the quantum system international units back in May of 2019 in which every one of our standards that we use to figure out how many nanograms of a drug is in your pill, to how many mega Newtons of force are necessary to crumble an airplane wing, that whole range is now based on quantum standards. So, this is a sort of revolution in how we do sensing and how we do calibrations, which will have big impacts down the road.
I think if you wanted to showcase an example technology, it's the creation of single photon detectors, devices where light comes in, we count light as photons. Almost every single photon that comes in is detected. And I want to contrast that with 30 years ago, when it was about one in every hundred was detected and now, we're at 99 in every hundred.
If you looked at the inventors of the concept of the photon back in the 1960s, they would have been flabbergasted to think that we now have technology that realizes that. That opened up huge new opportunities in astrophysics. It's been used to try and measure the cosmic microwave background, it's being used at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), it's being used in the telecommunications industry, and for space to ground communications. It's informative and that's just one example. But it's a little bit underplayed because people don't want to talk about computing.
The last point I'll make there is that sensors are the basis for what we use in computers at some level, right? Computers react to our environment. That's part of what makes them interesting. Quantum sensors are unique in that they actually provide a quantum signal, which enables quantum computers to take advantage of them in the ways that classical computing can't. And so, this build out of potential technologies will have direct applications and implications as quantum computing technologies mature. They really go hand in hand.
The Cipher Brief: Given the interconnectedness of the global economy, it seems that cooperation on quantum could become necessary between countries like the US and China, for example. Does the US have any official cooperation or dialogue regarding some of the impacts to our life like you just mentioned between those two countries or between other countries?
Taylor: Let's break that into two different chunks. With respect to China, the United States and China do have a science technology agreement, which covers a lot of topic areas. So, we have mechanisms and means of conversation and dialogue. But there's nothing specific there I want to talk about on the quantum side.
With respect to other countries around the world that are working in the space, back in December the United States and the government of Japan signed a joint statement about cooperation in quantum science technology. It talks about our shared values around research approaches and the importance of creating a good research environment, having appropriate protections of research as it is done, coming up with ways to share ideas, knowledge, people in order to achieve scientific breakthroughs.
The US and the European Commission had a joint workshop in September of last year digging into particular technological areas to work on together. So, there are a series of ongoing dialogues. We recognized back in our 2018 national strategic overview for quantum information science that the future of the nation's effort is actually one of greater international cooperation and collaboration in the space. The supply chain is international, the companies are multinational, the impact is global, and we recognize that, and we see great opportunity in finding like-minded partners and allies and working together.
The Cipher Brief: What do you think the biggest leaps will be in national security opportunities that are going to come from advances in quantum development?
Taylor: There are actually several different areas and they're quite different. In the short-term, there is the rollout of what's called quantum resistant cryptography. If you aren't tracking that, back in 2016, NIST and the National Security Agency both announced that the US government was going to develop a set of standards around quantum resistant cryptography - crypto systems that are not immediately or directly attackable via quantum outlet.
The context here is that there is an algorithm that runs on quantum computers called Shor's algorithm, named after Peter Shor. He's a mathematician at MIT. And that algorithm factors large numbers, which breaks many of the current public key crypto systems that are in use.
Jake Taylor, Asst. Dir. Quantum Information Science, Office of Science and Technology Policy, White House
NIST and NSA started that process many years ago and it continues today, and it does look to complete in 2022 with a standardization. There are many industry players who are involved in that standardization process. But once you standardize, then you have to roll it out. And that's going to create turmoil in the national security space and in the commercial space for sure because crypto systems take a very long time to roll out. So that's something that your readership should be aware of.
It's a 10 to 20-year transition, particularly in the commercial sector, it can be up to 20 years to transition to a whole new infrastructure for networking. But if we want a secure e-commerce system for an eventual future of large scope quantum computers and we want to be able to trust our transactions and other things, we need to trust the system and we believe this is a pathway for that. So that's a very technical change. There are also some real opportunities emerging in the defense space, some of which have to do with position navigation and timing, which is a key part of the military and has to do with communications. There are also opportunities in areas that are a little less obvious, like in medicine and materials. So, better battlefield medicine derives in part from better battlefield diagnostics derived in part from doing measurements in settings that we weren't able to do them in before, the type of thing that certain quantum sensors can excel at.
The Cipher Brief: What are some of the more likely areas of initial investment or practical economic impact that we're likely to see in quantum in the next decade?
Taylor: I like to think in decade timescales because if you're thinking that there is going to be a huge market in three years, you might be disappointed. However, you should be aware that there are some areas of quantum technologies where the market is already matured, just not in computing. Atomic clocks are an example, but other things are in frequency sources and detectors. Those markets are continuing to grow, but they're much more established. If you're looking at the nascent markets, particularly in the computing space, obviously there is a lot of interest in doing science and building to the technological base around quantum computing. That's a market in its own. It's not a huge market, but it is a market that is growing because people need to buy the equipment to do the experiments, they need to have the supply chain in place. And that's an area that we're looking at actual practical economic growth simply because the scientific and technical challenges are just so hard that you have to build an industry around it.
There are some other aspects and in particular I mentioned chemistry and materials, but then the other is in algorithms. One of the interesting things that's happening is that people are exploring what quantum computers can do by using small scope quantum computers and in the process, they're discovering some problems that we thought were hard, even for classical machines, that we thought maybe quantum could be just a bit better, but as it turns out, we also have better classical algorithms for them. So, there's a virtuous cycle of algorithm development in which we explore new problems, we're motivated by what we can do with quantum machines, we discover some things quantum machines can do better, we discover other things where what we were doing classically wasn't as good as what we could've done. And that actually helps businesses that are exploring their opportunity spaces to get immediate impact.
The Cipher Brief: Let’s talk about some of the steps the federal government has taken over the past several years.
Taylor: I think that’s important to understand. I mentioned how industry started really digging in about five years ago and this administration early on identified the innovation ecosystem around quantum information science as a critical area for the nation. Back in 2017, we had a priorities memo - which is a key part of how we do our internal work within the government - calling out quantum information science. I came on at the end of that year to lead our policy effort. That first year we released a national strategy. We were able to lay out a very clear pathway, a science first approach that engages industry, builds the workforce, has the infrastructure, maintains our national security and gets those international connections together.
We also had the passage of the National Quantum Initiative Act, run through a bipartisan process in Congress and signed by the President in December of 2018. That act really catalyzed improvements and changes at the agencies, expansions of our programs. In the president's budget that we asked for last year, we asked for $430 million on information science, which was a pretty big increase over some years prior, and Congress actually appropriated and the President signed more than that in the 2020 appropriations that enables new centers in the Department Of Energy to drive innovation in this space and new science.
There’s a big program at the National Science Foundation, a new consortium bringing together more than 80 US companies and a variety of additional nonprofits to do technology development and pre-competitive work together called the Quantum Economic Development Consortium that convened by SRI International, but it's put together by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the key elements of the National Quantum Initiative. And here at the White House, we formed the National Quantum Coordination Office called for in the law, which coordinates all of the agencies. We have 14 agencies that work in quantum information science and we coordinate the efforts across all of these agencies.
We're very excited also because in addition to all of these efforts, in the President's special requests for 2021 we're doubling down. We put a commitment in to completely double the Quantum Act budget by 2022 and a substantial portion of that doubling is already in the 2021 proposal. So, we're really excited that we're putting our money where our mouth is and making certain that we invest smartly and effectively in this space working closely with our allies in the private sector.
The Cipher Brief: Is there anything you really want people to understand right now about where we are with this and where we’re headed?
Taylor: I’ve mentioned that this is a critical priority for the administration and we're very excited about that, but I want to reiterate how this is part of our industries of the future. We recognize this as critical for what we need to be doing over the next decades.
We also recognize that we are going to need the people in order to do it, so we're very invested in ensuring a broad and diverse workforce growth into this space. It's not just PhD level physicists trying to build quantum computers or mathematicians, or computer scientists at the highest levels. But it's also the technical community, the engineering and marketing and the business communities all coming together and building a better literacy around our information science. I think people sometimes believe quantum mechanics is really hard and yet we give six-year-olds a Rubik's cube. The Rubik's cube is an embodiment of group theory in your hand. A quantum circuit that you can run on a quantum cloud service right now is another embodiment of group theory. There's no particular reason it should be considered hard. So, we're really looking to engage with our stakeholders and ensure that people look towards that broader opportunity space so that we can continue to realize the economic opportunity that quantum information science will bring.
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