Sir Peter Knight launched the National Quantum Technologies Programme in 2014
Quantum is certainly that, says Knight. Traditional transistors can only exist in two states, one or zero, known as a “bit”; but their quantum equivalents, known as “qubits”, can exist in both states at the same time, known as “superposition”. When several qubits are harnessed, the number of potential states, and thus computing power, quickly becomes vast. “Imagine that I had a machine with 1000 qubits under control,” says Knight. The number of states would be “larger than the number of particles in the visible universe”.
The trouble is that controlling qubits is hard. Currently, having 1000 qubits under control is still a pipedream.
Google has managed to harness 53, and even then much of their power is lost to interference, or noise. But that has still allowed the company to claim “quantum supremacy” by deploying its machine to solve a problem in a few seconds which would have taken a classical supercomputer 10,000 years.
A race we don’t want to lose
The possibilities are so tantalising that, as with Artificial Intelligence, countries around the world are announcing a rash of national quantum plans to ensure that they are not left behind.
America signed its $1.2bn (£870m) National Quantum Initiative Act in 2018; the EU’s €1bn (£860m) quantum flagship is lurching into action, with individual nations – notably France and Germany – committing billions more. And then there is China, whose quantum initiative is headed by the physicist Pan Jianwei. “I think he’s a genius,” says Knight. “These people are very, very smart, and they’re committed long term. There’s a warning there because we’re in a race and we don’t want to lose.”
Fortunately, says Knight, Britain has an advantage on international rivals: “We started five years before anybody else.” That was back in 2014, with the launch of the National Quantum Technologies Programme (UKNQT)
It was very much Knight’s baby, an embodiment of the triple alliance between government, academia and industry that he still believes is essential to move quantum tech from the theoretical to the practical.
Quantum Computing | What are the applications?
The UKNQT emerged from the fact that in the 1990s, UK universities became global leaders in the field of quantum research, which describes the weird-but-true properties of subatomic particles. “We were asking questions about the nature of reality,” says Knight. “It was frontier science and it attracted the brightest people.”
By the end of the 1990s “we ended up with this really talented cadre” of quantum specialists, all of whom were rising to senior academic positions, making discoveries, and thinking of how those discovering might change the world as they went. It included people like the Polish physicist Artur Ekert, one of Knight’s students, who was working on fundamental quantum principles. “One day he said: ‘I could build a secure communication system using this.’ That rising star generation could already see novel applications. We had a whale of a time in intellectual discovery, but there was a feeling that we could build on the science to commercialise.”
The cost of failure will be high
Ekert is now regarded as preeminent in the field of quantum cryptography. But quantum’s power is not just a boon to securing the world’s data. It is also a challenge, as the sheer power of the technology may be able to open the current locks we use to keep the online world private and protected in everything from web banking to e-commerce.
“I use the phrase ‘crypto apocalypse’ quite a lot. We need a roadmap for replacing for all that public key cryptography,” says Knight. But he is sanguine. The dangers are known. There is still time before quantum computers become ubiquitous to develop new, quantum-resilient encryption. “We can do it.”
An exhibition model of IBM's Q System One quantum computer
Credit: Getty
If the academics have long been enthused, the government was bizarrely convinced of the charms of quantum only after the notorious “Flash Crash” which devastated the New York stock exchange over half an hour in May 2010.
The technology is not just about super powerful computers, but also a new generation of optics, sensors (like the pothole detector) and even tiny atomic clocks. Such clocks, measuring the passage of time with infinite precision, allow the accurate timestamping of ultra high frequency trades of the kind that sank the Dow, “so we know who did what in what order, so the credit and blame can be assigned”.
Two years later, in the autumn statement of 2013, the government committed £270m to the UKNQT. In its first five-year phase the programme built out alliances in labs across the land – imaging in Glasgow; communication in York; sensors and timing in Birmingham; computing in Oxford.
Now, in its second five-year phase, there has been a “change of emphasis” to ensure business and industry harnesses the UK’s world-leading position.
“There’s not a widget which will win,” says Roger McKinlay, challenge director for Quantum Technologies at UK Research and Innovation which oversees government funding. “We want an industry, standards… it’s a long haul which we want to dominate.”
The cost for failure will be high, he adds, “in matters of national sovereignty and the impact on the economy and the impact on society. We know there are defence issues; we know there are security issues.”
Roger McKinlay, challenge director for Quantum Technologies at UK Research and Innovation, says Britain's aim is to dominate the industry
Credit: Adam Gasson
Ultimately UKNQT will invest £1bn over its 10 years. “You need an investment community that’s got deep pockets and is patient,” says Knight. “And there are two sorts of people that can do that: government and the IT majors.”
Amazon and Microsoft are already offering the power of quantum computing through the cloud. The fear is that once again, UK academic prowess will be best turned to economic advantage abroad.
From the discovery of new drugs, materials, or catalysts, few disagree that if harnessed, such advantage would be vast. For quantum technology has the power to help us shape the world around us at a molecular level, dramatically improving increasingly important processes like carbon capture and storage, say, or battery production.
“When they built the first translator at Bell labs, they said this is going to be transformative, but no one knew how,” says Knight.
“What will happen next [with quantum] will change things so greatly, it will be totally unexpected. Some people will get unnerved by it because nobody likes to be standing on quicksand. But we will make that journey together.”
- Read more: Inside the race to keep secrets safe from the quantum computing revolution
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