The Race to Quantum Supremacy

Rohan Kumar is a first-year intending to major in Physics and Mathematics. He is excited by research into quantum technology and is always looking for opportunities to get involved in the field. Outside the classroom, Rohan enjoys playing his alto saxophone, making dumb jokes, and engaging in oddly specific philosophical debate.

The year was 2013, andEdward Snowden had just released the first set of leaked documents from his time as an employee at the National Security Agency. Among these documents was information pertaining to a $79.7 million investment in Owning the Net (OTN), a project to develop a quantum computer capable of reading and decrypting important communications across the Internet. This information leak was one of the catalysts of public interest in quantum technology. Today, global superpowers are investing billions of dollars into quantum computing and security. But what is a quantum computer, and why is it best suited to the task of Owning the Net? To answer this, we must briefly take a look at some of the fundaEdward Snowden. THE TRIPLE HELIX Spring 2020 45

absence of a pulse as a '0'. Quantum computers, on the other hand, use types of information called qubits to perform computations. Unlike bits, qubits can take on a continuous range of values between 1 and 0. This means that instead of the two possible values that each bit can store, a qubit can theoretically represent an infinite number of values. It is this property of qubits that distinguishes the function of quantum computers from classical computers.

Quantum computCredit: Live Science ers are unique due An image of Sycamore, Google's 54-qubit quantum procesto their efficiency sor. It is the first processor to ever achieve quantum supremin solving specific acy. problems that are mental ideas behind quantum computing. of critical interest to governments and Quantum computers are intrinsically different from the computers people use every day and even the supercomputers used by technology companies such as Google and Facebook. All of those computers can large corporations. For example, many Internet communications today are secured by RSA encryption, a method of scrambling data such that only the receiver can unscramble it. While classical be classified under one category: classical computers. What defines a classical Quantum computers are computer is that it performs operations unique due to their effiusing bits, which are states that can be represented by either a 1 or a 0. This can be represented in a number of ways: for example, a classical computer might ciency in solving specific problems that are of critical interest to governuse the existence of an electrical pulse ments and large corpoat a particular moment as a '1' and the rations.

computers would take billions of years to break into RSA encrypted data, quantum computers could hypothetically decrypt the data in about two minutes using a process called Shor's Algorithm. This is the premise of the OTN project; in order to monitor communications of interest to the government, the National Security Agency funded a project to build a quantum computer capable of running Shor's Algorithm, allowing them to decrypt and record private Internet communications at will. On the other hand, quantum computers would also be able to implement special kinds of 'quantum encryption' that would be resistant to other quantum computers’ RSA-breaking abilities. However, the potential applications of quantum computers are not limited to security. A number of other tasks, such as the modelling of large systems and improving artificial intelligence, could be performed with significantly greater efficiency using quantum computers. This could accelerate development in a wide range of scientific and technological endeavours, such as medicine, chemical engineering, environmental science, and data science. All of these properties make quantum technology an area of great interest to governments, companies, and researchers.

Crucially, the above properties mean that a country with a quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm would be capable of surveilling communications in other countries with ease, as long as the other countries in question have not implemented quantum encryption algorithms. Due to the potentially devastating security compromises that could result from such an occurrence, governments around the world in the USA, China, Russia, and India have each invested billions of dollars into quantum computing research. In December 2018, President Donald Trump signed the National Quantum

Credit: USTC Professor Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China working on an optical quantum computer.

A number of other tasks, such as the modelling of large systems and improving artificial intelligence, could be performed with significantly greater efficiency using quantum computers Initiative Act, a $1.2 billion program to advance quantum computing across the country. On the other side of the world, President Xi Jinping has also dedicated large sums of money to research in the field. While China's total spending on quantum technology is unknown, the $10 billion National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences in Hefei is expected to be completed by 2020. Behind these two frontrunners, India committed over $1 billion into the field in February 2020, putting it in the top tier of countries invested in quantum computing.

While the funding of quantum technology has been on the rise, only two institutions have ever reached 'quantum supremacy', a term used to describe a demonstration of a real quantum computer's ability to outperform a classical computer in performing a given task. In October 2019, Google (in collaboration with NASA) first achieved quantum supremacy using its 54-qubit quantum computer “Sycamore” by executing a truly random number generation algorithm in 200 seconds, more than a billion times faster than a classical computer would have taken. Briefly, this seemed to place the United States as the global leader in the race towards quantum computing. However, just days later, researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) achieved quantum supremacy with their own optical quantum computer. On the quantum communications front as well, China poses significant competition to the US. In January 2020, USTC announced that it had engineered an 80 kilogram 'ground station' capable of communicating with quantum satellites in orbit around the Earth. This ground station would use photon qubits to perform long-range quantum communication with satellites carrying the appropriate quantum technology in space. Given that the ground station can't move during the communication and that its portability is limited, the technology is far from perfect. However, once fully developed, anyone with a ground station would theoretically be able to perform remote and perfectly secure quantum communication across the world.

In 2019, the battle between the USA and China over quantum technology became underhanded. A report by private intelligence firm Strider revealed that the Chinese government was mak

[A]nyone with a ground station would theoretically be able to perform remote and perfectly secure quantum communication across the world.

ing systematic efforts to steal and exploit the USA’s federally funded research in quantum technology. In order to develop their quantum technology workforce, China sent scientists to conduct research in leading quantum technology labs across the USA for training on the condition that they would return to China on demand.

Years later, the Chinese government would request the scientists to return home and work on their local quantum technology projects, allowing them to capitalise on the knowledge and expertise the scientists gained from their research experience in the USA. At the centre of this operation was the USTC in China, the same university that achieved quantum supremacy days after Google pioneered the achievement. From this event, it is clear that the stakes of the race towards practical quantum computers are only escalating.

While the race towards quantum security may seem ominous, most experts agree that internet-breaking quantum computation is still decades away. Developments in the other applications of

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quantum technology, such as more efficient simulation and optimization, are expected much sooner. Despite this, the high global stakes of the applications of quantum technology will likely cause the race to continue to escalate. Until then, we can only speculate what form the competition surrounding quantum technology will take. Will we see a conflict similar to the Cold War, where two superpowers make large political moves to outcompete each other as tensions continue to rise? Will other countries get involved, forming competing coalitions? Will all parties decide to form an international treaty to mitigate the potentially disastrous effects of quantum technology in the wrong hands? Is a quantum cold war on the horizon? Only time will tell.

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