Eric Miller
Executive Summary
The world is on the cusp of a revolution in quantum technologies. Countries and private investors around the world are deploying hundreds of millions of dollars to advance research and develop quantum technologies for defence and commercial applications.This interest is driven by what quantum technologies can do relative to their “classical” counterparts. Quantum technologies function by harnessing the key characteristics of the theory of quantum mechanics, including superposition, entanglement and uncertainty. The resulting technologies are expected to be diverse and far reaching. For example, quantum computers are expected to overcome most “public key encryption” systems, presaging a radical change in cybersecurity. Given its aptitude for navigating complexity, quantum tools are expected to shave years off the time to market for medicines. Secure, efficient communications among drones and other autonomous vehicles will underpin safety and operational effectiveness in the crowded skies of the future. Of course, these nearer terms examples will be joined by applications barely yet imagined as the technology matures.
The competition for quantum supremacy is growing more intense by the day. China has been heavily focused on quantum for over a decade and is among the most ambitious in pursuing these technologies. It is known to have made strong advances in quantum communications among other areas. Watching China’s success in transmitting quantum encrypted communications via satellite, the United States began seriously investing in quantum in 2018. Significant government and venture capital is now flooding into a vast array of applications. The United Kingdom, Europe and Japan are similarly making significant investments.
Canada enters the quantum era extraordinarily well positioned. It spent over a C$1 billion in the decade-plus prior to 2018 building out a world class research and commercial ecosystems. Strong centers of excellence include Vancouver, Calgary, Waterloo, Toronto, and Sherbrooke. These centers are developing strong local research and commercial partners as well as linkages with global players. The C$360 million investment announced by the federal government in the spring of 2021 and the development of a National Quantum Strategy will significantly advance this work.
In its final section, the paper offers some recommendations on how Canada should build on its carefully nurtured advantages in quantum. The key thematic areas in which it offers recommendations include: (1) securing national economic advantage; (2) advancing national security; (3) pursuing international cooperation; and (4) developing infrastructure for the quantum era.
Introduction
Quantum computing really stands out as having exponentially greater power … (meaning) that on any future time scale, it’s just going to dwarf anything else … (Y)ou get an exponential advantage using a quantum computer which really turns the impossible into the possible.
- Jeremy O’Brien, CEO of PsiQuantum (2019)1
In August 2016, China launched its QUESS satellite into orbit with the explicit objective of using it to transmit quantum encrypted communications. This was to be the backbone of “Project Jinan,” which saw an experimental quantum communications network built in the city of Jinan – located partway between Beijing and Shanghai. A few months later, a test was initiated. China successfully transmitted a green laser beam comprised of entangled photons via satellite between two ground stations 750 miles apart. Technically, this was an extraordinary achievement. The fragile nature of quantum particles makes them very hard to transmit. Previous ground-based experiments using optical fibre found that the signal would get corrupted after just 150 miles.2 While this may sound like an interesting science project, it actually was the foundation of what many see as the world’s first unhackable communications network. China’s success in satellite transmission garnered worldwide attention and analysts began to speak of the “age of quantum cryptography.”
In Washington and other Western capitals, Project Jinan was a wake-up call. For the first decade and a half of the 21st century, U.S. attention was centred on fighting terrorists from Mesopotamia to the Hindu Kush. Less emphasis was therefore placed on building the next generation of advanced technologies necessary to confront sophisticated adversaries. As Diana Franklin, director of computer science at the University of Chicago, told Congress in May 2018, “gaps in funding (over the past 15 years) have left the U.S. scrambling to stay ahead in quantum (technologies).”3 By contrast, each year of the 21st century, China was ramping up its technology investments as its strength grew militarily and economically. This included pouring billions of dollars into mastering quantum technologies.
As the full scope of China’s rise was settling into the minds of policy-makers, the prospect of facing an adversary with a substantially unhackable communications network pushed the United States to seriously enter the quantum game. At the same time, policy-makers began to see that the ability to master quantum phenomena would provide a foundation for significant economic opportunities. The U.S. passed its organizing legislation, the National Quantum Initiative Act (NQI), in 2018. Concurrently, jurisdictions such as Japan, Germany, India and Russia are spending heavily on developing their own capabilities for their own purposes.
It is hard to accurately predict the full scope of technologies that advances in quantum will yield. Quantum computing is receiving most of the attention as tech giants and emerging players race to build devices to apply quantum phenomena to storing and processing data. Various groups are presently experimenting with applications in areas as diverse as accelerating drug development to optimizing supply chains. A parallel intensive effort is underway in quantum communications, which links computers through a new internet built on quantum principles. The United States has publicly committed to build a national quantum internet by 2030, even as China is advancing rapidly in this area.
In addition to the infrastructure and methodologies to enable data transmission, areas of inquiry such as quantum key distribution are moving ahead. Quantum metrology, which uses quantum phenomena to undertake highly precise measurements, is making strides in areas such as biological imaging and simulation. Quantum sensors are being developed for applications ranging from precisely mapping targets to mineral exploration. This big and diverse array of quantum applications will drive many tangible innovations.
Cyber-security is an overarching theme for researchers in the quantum age, including the arcane but crucially important area of cryptography – the study of the use of codes to facilitate secure communications. Communications experts have a strong theoretical understanding of how quantum computers will be able to crack most existing public key cryptographic systems. In other words, quantum computers will render largely useless most of the existing encryption systems that are used to secure our data, from credit cards to passports to sensitive emails. While quantum computers have yet to achieve the power and accuracy necessary to break widely used encryption methodologies such as RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman), it is only a matter of time until the arrival of what some security experts call “Q Day.”4 In preparation, some researchers and government agencies are turning their attention to creating quantum encryption algorithms and to addressing foundational elements in areas such as true randomness. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), for example, has been running an open international competition to design “post-quantum algorithms.”5
Canada has been an early investor in quantum. As quantum applications prepare to transition from the laboratory to the marketplace, Canada’s work in nurturing world-leading research centres and innovative start-ups seems poised to pay off. However, the quantum innovation game is getting harder and more intense. In order to benefit, Canada needs to focus on at least three areas: (1) growing great quantum companies; (2) supporting research that maximizes Canadian participation in breakthrough quantum innovations; and (3) preparing public institutions (both civilian and military) and national infrastructure for the quantum age. Ottawa announced a significant new investment in its April 2021 budget. The key question now is around execution.
Quantum is a complex area. Part 1 of this paper will therefore explain what quantum technologies are and how the sector has evolved. Part 2 will offer some examples of how quantum technologies are likely to be applied in military, commercial and hybrid settings. Part 3 will elaborate on what major jurisdictions are doing in quantum, including China, the United Kingdom, Europe, Japan and the United States. Part 4 will describe the Canadian context and Part 5 will offer recommendations for how to retain and extend Canada’s leadership position in the quantum revolution.
What are Quantum Technologies?
The quantum revolution has been more than a century in the making. The word “quantum” is the singular form of the Latin adjective “quantus,” meaning “how much.” Quantum technologies are based on quantum mechanics, a fundamental theory in physics that describes the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and sub-atomic particles.
The ideas that gave rise to quantum mechanics arose gradually, building especially on the work of Max Planck, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, in the first decades of the 20th century.
Quantum mechanics is one of the strangest, most magnificent and least intuitive theories ever to be developed in the history of science. While studying atoms and sub-atomic particles sounds esoteric, in the decades after it was proposed, knowledge of quantum mechanics would facilitate the development of technologies as diverse as the atomic bomb, the semiconductor, life-saving magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, and global positioning systems (GPS). Quantum physics would also set off fierce philosophical debates about the nature of God and the interconnectedness of the universe.
In 1913, visionary Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed the core foundations of what become the theory of quantum mechanics. In a quantum world, the universe does not unfold in a predictable, linear fashion. Rather, the future is merely probabilistic. Over the next decade and a half, Bohr and contemporaries, including Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and Max Born, refined quantum mechanics into a fulsome theory.
Einstein, whose theory of relativity opened the door, led the charge against quantum mechanics, famously stating that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” His 1935 paper with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, which became known as the EPR Paradox, argued that the description of physical reality by quantum mechanics was incomplete.
It would take decades of experimentation to resolve this debate. In 1964, John Bell, an Irish physicist, developed a way to test Bohr’s and Einstein’s ideas. As he wryly summed up his conclusions: “Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, willfully obscure and right. Einstein was consistent, clear, down-to-earth and wrong.”6
Broadly speaking, physicists seek to describe the nature of the universe. When they are successful, engineers can then build tools and systems that harness these underlying dynamics to solve real-world problems. Bell’s tests were instrumental in further solidifying quantum theory. In 1984, a Canadian, Gilles Brassard, professor at the Université de Montréal, co-invented BB84, a protocol for leveraging quantum mechanics for cryptography. This provided a key theoretical foundation for quantum computing. In the late 1990s, the first rudimentary quantum computers were built. Some 20 years later, quantum computers have achieved supremacy over the best supercomputers in certain experiments. Over the next few years, this advantage will become more consistent and facilitate the movement of quantum computers from the laboratory into the outside world. Concurrently, a whole new array of other quantum technologies will similarly transition.
One key difference between the quantum technologies to come and first-generation 20th century technologies, such as semiconductors and GPS systems, is that the latter benefited from quantum knowledge but did not “directly harness uniquely quantum phenomena such as superposition, uncertainty or entanglement within individual quantum states to perform a task or achieve a result.”7 The second-generation applications are built squarely on manipulating quantum effects to achieve outcomes.
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