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The UK is now facing a huge challenge: after having secured a top spot in the quantum race, retaining the country's status is going to require some serious stepping up.

National quantum programs and decade-long quantum strategies are increasingly being announced by governments around the world. And as countries unlock billions-worth of budgets, it is becoming clear that a furious competition is gradually unrolling. Nations want to make sure that they are the place-to-be when quantum technologies start showing some real-world value and the UK, for one, is keen to prove that it is a quantum hotspot in the making.

"We have a very successful program that is widely admired and emulated around the world," said Peter Knight, who sits on the strategic advisory for the UK's national quantum technology program (NQTP), as he provided a virtual update on the NQTP's performance so far.

Speaking at an online conference last month, Knight seemed confident. The UK, said the expert, in line with the objectives laid out in the program, is on track to become "the go-to place" for new quantum companies to start, and for established businesses to base all manners of innovative quantum activities.

SEE: Hiring Kit: Computer Hardware Engineer (TechRepublic Premium)

The UK is just over halfway through the NQTP, which saw its second five-year phase kick off at the end of 2019, and at the same timehit an impressive milestone of 1 billion ($1.37 billion) combined investment. This, the government claims, is letting the UK keep pace with competitors who are also taking interest in quantum namely, the US and China.

There is no doubt that the country has made strides in the field of quantum since the start of the NQTP. New ground-breaking research papers are popping up on a regular basis, and so are news reports of rounds of funding from promising quantum startups.

But with still just under half of the national quantum program to carry out, and despite the huge sums already invested, the UK is now facing a bigger challenge yet: after having chased a top spot in the quantum race, retaining the country's status in the face of ferocious competition is going to require some serious stepping up.

Clearly playing in favor of the UK is the country's early involvement in the field. The NQTP was announced as early as 2013, and started operating in 2014, with an initial 270 million ($370 million) budget. The vision laid out in the program includes creating a "quantum-enabled economy", in which the technology would significantly contribute to the UK's economy and attract both strong investment and global talent.

"The national program was one of the first to kick off," Andrew Fearnside, senior associate specializing in quantum technologies at intellectual property firm Mewburn Ellis, tells ZDNet. "There are increasingly more national programs emerging in other countries, but they are a good few years behind us. The fact that there has been this sustained and productive long-term government initiative is definitely attractive."

The EU's Quantum Technologies Flagship, in effect,only launched in 2018; some countries within the bloc,like France, started their own quantum roadmaps on top of the European initiative even later. Similarly, the National Quantum Initiative Act wassigned into law by the Trump administration but that was also in 2018, years into the UK's national quantum technology program.

Since it launched in 2014, there has been abundant evidence of the academic successes of the initial phase of the NQTP. In Birmingham, the Quantum Sensing Hub is developing new types of quantum-based magnetic sensors that could help diagnose brain and heart conditions, while the Quantum Metrology Institute leads the development of quantum atomic clocks. There are up to 160 research groups and universities registered across the UK withprograms that are linked to quantum technologies, working on projects ranging from the design of quantum algorithms to the creation of new standards and verification methods.

A much harder challenge, however, is to transform this strong scientific foundation into business value and as soon as the UK government announced the second phase of the NQTP at the end of 2019,a clear messageemerged: quantum technology needed to come out of the lab, thanks to increased private sector investment that would accelerate commercialization.

Some key initiatives followed. A national quantum computing center was established for academics to work alongside commercial partners such as financial services company Standard Chartered, "possibly with an eye on financial optimization problems," notes Fearnside, given the business'established interest in leveraging quantum technologies. A 10 million ($13 million) "Discovery" program alsolaunched a few months ago, bringing together five quantum computing companies, three universities and the UK's national physical laboratory all for the purpose of making quantum work for businesses.

The government's efforts have been, to an extent, rewarded. The quantum startup ecosystem is thriving in the UK, with companies like Riverlane or Cambridge Quantum Computing completing strong rounds of private financing. In total, up to 204 quantum-related businesses have been listed so far in the country.

But despite these encouraging results, the UK is still faced with a big problem. Bringing university-born innovation to the real worldhas always been a national challenge, and quantum is no exception. A 2018 report from the Science and Technology committee, in fact,gave an early warning of the stumbling blocksthat the NQTP might run into, and stressed the need for improved awareness across industry of the potential of quantum technologies.

The committee urged the government to start conveying the near-term benefits that quantum could provide to businesses something that according to the report, CEOs and company chairs in North America worryingly seem to realize a whole lot better.

It's been three years since the report was published, and things haven't changed much. Speaking at the same forum as the NQTP's Peter Knight, Ian West, a partner at consultancy firm KPMG, said that there remained a huge barrier to the widespread take-up of quantum technologies in the UK. "Some of our clients feel they don't understand the technology, or feel it's one for the academics only," he argued.

"We need that demand from businesses who will be the ultimate users of quantum technologies, to encourage more investment," West added. "We need to do much more to explain the near-term and medium-term use cases for business applications of quantum technologies."

SEE: BMW explores quantum computing to boost supply chain efficiencies

Without sufficient understanding of the technology, funding problems inevitably come. The difficulty of securing private money for quantum stands in stark contrast to the situation across the Atlantic, where investors have historically done a better job of spotting and growing successful technology companies. Add the deep pockets of tech giants such as Google, IBM or Microsoft, which are all pouring money into quantum research, and it is easy to see why North America might have better prospects when it comes to winning the quantum game.

In the worst of cases, this has led to US technology hubs hoovering up some of the best quantum brains in the UK. In 2019, for example, PsiQ, a promising startup that was founded at the University of Bristol with the objective of producing a commercial quantum computer, re-located to Silicon Valley. The movewas reported to be partly motivated by a lack of access to capital in Europe. It was a smart decision: according to the company's latest update, PsiQ hasnow raised $215 million (156 million) in VC funding.

Pointing to the example of PsiQ, Simon King, partner and deep tech investor at VC firm Octopus Ventures, explains that to compete against the US, the UK needs to up its game when it comes to assessing the startups that show promise, and making sure that they are injected with adequate cash.

"The US remains the biggest competitor, with a big concentration of universities and academics and the pedigree and culture of commercializing university research," King tells ZDNet. "Things are definitely moving in the right direction, but the UK and Europe still lag behind the US, where there is a deeper pool of capital and there are more investors willing to invest in game-changing, but long-term technology like quantum."

US-based private investors are only likely to increase funding for the quantum ecosystem in the coming years, and significant amounts of public money will be backing the technology too. The National Quantum Initiative Act that was signed in 2018 came with $1.2 billion (870 million) to be invested in quantum information science over the next five years; as more quantum companies flourish, the budget can be expected to expand even further.

Competition will be coming from other parts of the world as well. In addition to the European Commission's 1 billion ($1.20 billion) quantum flagship, EU countries are also spending liberally on the technology. Germany, in particular, has launched a 2 billion ($2.4 billion) funding program for the promotion of quantum technologies in the country, surpassing by far many of its competitors; but France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland are all increasingly trying to establish themselves as hubs for quantum startups and researchers.

SEE: Less is more: IBM achieves quantum computing simulation for new materials with fewer qubits

Little data is available to measure the scope of the commercialization of quantum technology in China, but the country has made no secret of its desire to secure a spot in the quantum race, too. The Chinese government has ramped up its spending on research and development, and the impact of that investment has already shown in the countryachieving some significant scientific breakthroughs in the field.

In the midst of this ever-more competitive landscape, whether the UK can effectively distinguish itself as the "go-to place" for quantum technologies remains to be seen. One thing is for certain: the country has laid some very strong groundwork to compete. "The UK has some genuinely world-class universities with some really brilliant academics, so while the objective is certainly ambitious, it's not out of the question," argues King.

But even top-notch researchers and some of the most exciting quantum startups might not cut it. The UK has positioned itself well from an early stage in the quantum race, but becoming a frontrunner was only one part of the job. Preserving the country's position for the coming years might prove to be the hardest challenge yet.

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The global quantum computing race has begun. What will it take to win it? - ZDNet

Security experts have long worried that advances in quantum computing could eventually make it easier to break encryption that protects the privacy of peoples data. Thats because these sophisticated machines can perform calculations at speeds impossible for conventional computers, potentially enabling them to crack codes previously thought indecipherable.

Now, a Swiss technology company says it has made a breakthrough by using quantum computers to uncover vulnerabilities in commonly used encryption. The company believes its found a security weakness that could jeopardize the confidentiality of the worlds internet data, banking transactions and emails.

Terra Quantum AG said its discovery upends the current understanding of what constitutes unbreakable encryption and could have major implications for the worlds leading technology companies, such as Alphabet Inc.s Google, Microsoft Corp., and International Business Machines Corp.

Don't miss: ProtonMail, Threema, Tresorit and Tutanota warn EU of risks of weakening encryption

But some other security experts said they arent nearly ready to declare a major breakthrough, at least not until the company publishes the full details of its research. If true, this would be a huge result, said Brent Waters, a computer science professor who specialises in cryptography at the University of Texas at Austin. It seems somewhat unlikely on the face of it. However, it is pretty hard for experts to weigh in on something without it being published.

IBM spokesman Christopher Sciacca said his company has known the risks for 20 years and is working on its own solutions to address the issue of post-quantum security. This is why the National Institute of Science & Technology (NIST) has been hosting a challenge to develop a new quantum safe crypto standard, he said in an email. IBM has several proposals for this new standard in the final round, which is expected in a few years.

Brian LaMacchia, distinguished engineer at Microsoft, said company cryptographers are collaborating with the global cryptographic community to prepare customers and data centers for a quantum future. Preparing for security in a post-quantum world is important not only to protect and secure data in the future but also to ensure that future quantum computers are not a threat to the long-term security of todays information.

Google didnt reply to a message seeking comment.

Terra Quantum AG has a team of about 80 quantum physicists, cryptographers and mathematicians, who are based in Switzerland, Russia, Finland and the US What currently is viewed as being post-quantum secure is not post-quantum secure, said Markus Pflitsch, chief executive officer and founder of Terra Quantum, in an interview. We can show and have proven that it isnt secure and is hackable.

Also read: Heres how an encrypted, locked Android and Apple phone gets bypassed

Pflitsch founded the company in 2019. Hes a former finance executive who began his career as a research scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Terra Quantums research is led by two chief technology officers Gordey Lesovik, head of the Laboratory of Quantum Information Technology at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and Valerii Vinokur, a Chicago-based physicist who in 2020 won the Fritz London Memorial Prize for his work in condensed matter and theoretical physics.

The company said that its research found vulnerabilities that affect symmetric encryption ciphers, including the Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES, which is widely used to secure data transmitted over the internet and to encrypt files. Using a method known as quantum annealing, the company said its research found that even the strongest versions of AES encryption may be decipherable by quantum computers that could be available in a few years from now.

Vinokur said in an interview that Terra Quantums team made the discovery after figuring out how to invert whats called a hash function, a mathematical algorithm that converts a message or portion of data into a numerical value. The research will show that what was once believed unbreakable doesnt exist anymore, Vinokur said, adding that the finding means a thousand other ways can be found soon.

Read more: Chinese scientists make world's first light-based quantum computer: Report

The company, which is backed by the Zurich-based venture capital firm Lakestar LP, has developed a new encryption protocol that it says cant be broken by quantum computers. Vinokur said the new protocol utilizes a method known as quantum key distribution.

Terra Quantum is currently pursuing a patent for the new protocol. But the company will make it available for free, according to Pflitsch. We will open up access to our protocol to make sure we have a safe and secure environment, said Pflitsch. We feel obliged to share it with the world and the quantum community.

The US government, like China, has made research in quantum computing research an economic and national security priority, saying that the world is on the cusp of what it calls a new quantum revolution. In addition, technology companies including Google, Microsoft, and IBM have made large investments in quantum computing in recent years.

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A Swiss company claims it used quantum computers to find weakness in encryption - HT Tech

Scientists and engineers at the University of Sydney and Microsoft Corporation have developed a device that can handle thousands of qubits. To put things in perspective, the current state-of-the-art quantum computer can control only 50 qubits at a time.

Scaled-up quantum computers require control interfaces to manipulate or readout a large number of qubits, which usually operate at temperatures close to absolute zero (1 Kelvin or -273 degrees celsius).

The complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology has its limitations due to high thermodynamic dissipation, leading to heating of the fragile quantum bits. Overheating of quantum bits compromises its quantumness, the property of being in two states at the same time (also called superposition).

The current architecture uses multiple connections as every qubit is controlled by external circuitry with a separate electrical connection, generating a lot of heat.

The scientists from the University of Sydney built a CMOS interface between the qubits and the external circuitry, in such a way that the CMOS chip can generate control pulses for multiple qubits, with just four low-bandwidth wires, at 0.1 Kelvin, a temperature 30 times colder than deep space, with ultralow power dissipation.

The interface consists of four low-bandwidth wires at room temperature to provide input signals to the chip, which then configures 32 analogue circuit blocks to control the qubits that use dynamic voltage signals.

Analogue circuit boards use the low leakage of the transistors to generate dynamic voltage signals for manipulating qubits, consuming significantly less power.

Quantum computers are at a similar stage that classical computers were in their 40s when machines needed control rooms to function.

However, this chip, according to the scientists, is the most advanced integrated circuit ever built to operate at deep cryogenic temperatures.

The quantum computers that we have now are still lab prototypes and are not commercially relevant yet. Hence, this is definitely a big step towards building practical and commercially relevant quantum computers, said Mr Viraj Kulkarni, But I think that we are still far away from it.

This is because of the Error Correction. Any computing device always has errors in it and no electronic device can be completely perfect. There are various techniques that computers use to correct those errors.

Now the problem with quantum computing is that qubits are very fragile. Even a slight increase in temperature, vibrations, or even cosmic rays can make qubits lose their quantumness, and this introduces errors. So the key question of whether we can really control these errors is still relevant.

Nivedita Dey, research coordinator at Quantum Research and Development Labs, said the qubit noise is still a roadblock in developing quantum computers.

One of the biggest challenges in implementing a quantum circuit in this Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) era is qubit noise, which causes hindrance in commercial availability of fault-tolerant full-scale quantum computers, said Ms Dey.

This approach can be well suited for practical quantum applications and might reduce the number of error-correcting qubits to be associated with noisy qubits, she added.

If quantum computing does prove to be commercially viable, it will open up completely new avenues.

A plane is not just faster than a car, it can also fly, said Mr Kulkarni, drawing an analogy between quantum computers and conventional computers. The idea is that quantum computers are not just faster, but at the same time will provide us with solutions that are better, especially in AI.

Hence, many applications in AI including complex mathematical equations, drug discovery by enabling chemical simulations, or building financial applications to come up with a better strategy will be solved in a faster and efficient way.

In the end its a tool, so any function a conventional computer can achieve, quantum computers will be able to do it faster and better.

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Microsoft Scientists Build Chip That Can Handle Thousands Of Qubits - Analytics India Magazine

In late 2019, Google, in partnership with NASA, said that its quantum computer performed in 200 seconds a computation that would take the worlds fastest supercomputer thousands of years. Even so, quantum computers need quantum networks to communicate, and todays internet doesnt cut it.

In hot pursuit of a quantum internet is the University of Arizona in Tucson, which the National Science Foundation selected last summer to receive a five-year, $26 million grant to establish the Center for Quantum Networks. CQNs director and principal investigator, Saikat Guha, a professor in the universitys College of Optical Sciences, will lead a team that brings together leading researchers from Howard University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Oregon, Northern Arizona University, the University of Chicago and Brigham Young University.

One of the CQN projects will involve building a test bed in Tucson a quantum network spanning six buildings and 10 laboratory sites on campus. On the East Coast, CQNs partner universities, including Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will build a Boston-area test bed to explore quantum communications in a conceptually simple network setting over metropolitan-scale distances, Guha says.

Whenever it arrives, the quantum internet will not replace the classical internet. Instead, users will see an upgrade with a new service: that of quantum communication. The quantum internet would initially be used for research and targeted applications by government, academia and industry users, including national defense, banking and finance, the cloud computing industry, and pharmaceutical research and development, Guha explains. A biomedical researcher could use the quantum internet to simulate a new synthetic molecule. Eventually, a student could open a quantum cloud computing app on a handheld device to perform computations.

The biggest impact on academia that I foresee is creating a transdisciplinary bridge and collaboration among researchers in disciplines that would not have otherwise worked together, Guha says.

Quantum internet research could spawn a new generation of IT innovation. Source: University of Arizona

Other teams across the globe are similarly exploring quantum networking. The European Quantum Internet Alliance, formed in 2018 from 12 universities in eight countries, announced a major development from the Sorbonne University team in October in achieving the scalability of a quantum internet. And in the U.S., the collaboration between Stony Brook University in New York and Brookhaven National Laboratory recently demonstrated that quantum bits (qubits) from two distant quantum computers can be entangled in a third location.

There will be new apps that use this new service for things we do not know today, Guha says. The quantum internet, when available to the average home, will spawn a whole new generation of IT innovators and app developers who will come up with new ways the powerful new service of quantum communication can be used.

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Universities are Building the Future of Quantum Internet - EdTech Magazine: Focus on Higher Education

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The additional geographical segments are also mentioned in the empirical report.

North America:U.S., Canada, Rest of North AmericaEurope:UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Rest of EuropeAsia Pacific:China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, North Korea, South Korea, Rest of Asia PacificLatin America:Brazil, Argentina, Rest of Latin AmericaMiddle East and Africa:GCC Countries, South Africa, Rest of Middle East & Africa

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Chapter 1, Definition, Specifications and Classification of Quantum Computing, Applications of Quantum Computing, Market Segment by Regions;Chapter 2, Manufacturing Cost Structure, Raw Material and Suppliers, Manufacturing Process, Industry Chain Structure;Chapter 3, Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Quantum Computing, Capacity and Commercial Production Date, Manufacturing Plants Distribution, R&D Status and Technology Source, Raw Materials Sources Analysis;Chapter 4, Overall Market Analysis, Capacity Analysis (Company Segment), Sales Analysis (Company Segment), Sales Price Analysis (Company Segment);Chapter 5 and 6, Regional Market Analysis that includes United States, China, Europe, Japan, Korea & Taiwan, Quantum Computing Segment Market Analysis (by Type);Chapter 7 and 8, The Quantum Computing Segment Market Analysis (by Application) Major Manufacturers Analysis of Quantum Computing ;Chapter 9, Market Trend Analysis, Regional Market Trend, Market Trend by Product Type Hardware, Software, Services, Market Trend by Application Simulation, Optimization, Sampling;Chapter 10, Regional Marketing Type Analysis, International Trade Type Analysis, Supply Chain Analysis;Chapter 11, The Consumers Analysis of Global Quantum Computing ;Chapter 12, Quantum Computing Research Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and data source;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, Quantum Computing sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.

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Global Quantum Computing Market 2020 Industry Insights, Drivers, Top Trends, Global Analysis And Forecast to 2027 - The Courier