China speeds ahead of U.S. as quantum race escalates, worrying scientists
China speeds ahead of U.S. as quantum race escalates, worrying
scientists
By TIM JOHNSON OCTOBER 23, 2017 5:00 AM
WASHINGTON - U.S. and other Western scientists voice awe,
and even alarm, at China’s quickening advances and spending on quantum
communications and computing, revolutionary technologies that could give a huge
military and commercial advantage to the nation that conquers them.
The concerns echo — although to a lesser degree — the
shock in the West six decades ago when the Soviets launched the Sputnik
satellite, sparking a space race.
In quick succession, China in recent months has utilized
a quantum satellite to transmit ultra-secure data, inaugurated a 1,243-mile
quantum link between Shanghai and Beijing, and announced a $10 billion quantum
computing center.
“To me, what is alarming is the level of coordination of
what they’ve done,” said Christopher Monroe, a physicist and pioneer in quantum
communication at the University of Maryland.
Perhaps more than the accomplishments of the Chinese
scientists, it is the resources that China is pouring into the research into
how atoms, photons and other basic molecular matter can harness, process and
transmit information.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean that their scientists are better,”
said Martin Laforest, a physicist and senior manager at the Institute for
Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. “It’s just
that when they say, ‘We need a billion dollars to do this,’ bam, the money
comes.”
The engineering hurdles that China has cleared for
quantum communication means that the United States will lag in that area for
years.
“The general feeling is that they’ll get there before
us,” said Rene Copeland, a high-performance computer expert who is president of
D-Wave (Government) Inc., a Vancouver-area company that uses aspects of quantum
computing in its systems.
But building a functioning quantum computer sets forth
different kinds of challenges than mastering quantum communication, and may
involve creating materials and processes that do not yet exist. Once thought to
be decades off, scientists now presume a quantum computer may be built in a
decade or less. The stakes are so high that advances by the U.S. government
remain secret.
“We don’t know exactly where the United States is. I
fervently hope that a lot of this work is taking place in a classified
setting,” said R. Paul Stimers, a lawyer at K&L Gates, a Washington law
firm, who specializes in emerging technologies. “It is a race.”
Pure quantum computers remain largely theoretical
although simple prototypes exist. Many designs call for them to operate in
super cold conditions, bordering on absolute zero, or around minus 458 degrees
Fahrenheit, colder than outer space, without any noise or micro movements that
can cause malfunction.
What has made them the Holy Grail for nations and private
industry is that quantum computers, in theory, are magnitudes better at sifting
huge amounts of data than the binary processors that power mainframes, desktops
and even smart phones today. They also can process algorithms that break all
widely used encryption.
Rather than doing a series of millions of computations,
based on binary options of ones and zeros, quantum computers employ particles
that exist in an infinite number of “superpositions” of the two states
simultaneously, a condition that towering physicist Albert Einstein once
labeled as “spooky.”
A quantum computer “can feel all the possibilities at
once,” said Warner A. Miller, a physicist at Florida Atlantic University, who,
like the others, spoke last week at a forum on quantum computing at the Hudson Institute,
a think tank in Washington.
China splashed into the news in June when it announced
that a satellite and a ground station had communicated through “entangled”
quantum particles. Entangled particles, even if separated by thousands of
miles, act in unison. Any change in one particle will induce a change in the
other, almost as if a single particle existed in multiple places at once.
Such long-distance quantum communication smashed records,
occurring over 745 miles, far beyond the mile or so scientists had tested
previously, and signaled Chinese mastery over a form of communication deemed
ultra-secure and unhackable.
“I read that on a Sunday and went, ‘oh sh-t,’” said
Gregory S. Clark, an Australian-born mathematician who is chief executive of
Symantec Corp., a global cybersecurity company with headquarters in Mountain
View, California.
Neither the U.S. military nor private industry is known
to have such a capability.
If the technology is refined, Clark said, it could make
land-based communications infrastructure obsolete. “The whole world changes,”
he said at a forum Sept. 19.
In early September, China chalked up another milestone,
completing a quantum communication link between its capital and Shanghai, by
far the biggest such link in the world, surpassing anything in the United
States or Europe.
In such a link, if an encryption key used by either of
two parties faces interference by a third party, the two parties know not to use
it.
China again demonstrated the prowess of its space-based
quantum satellite, dubbed Micius, on Sept. 29 when the head of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences held a video conference with an Austrian scientist over a
distance of 4,630 miles.
Also last month, China announced that it would build the
world’s biggest quantum research facility, a $10 billion center in Hefei,
capital of Anhui province, with the aim of building a working quantum computer
that could break most any encryption within seconds.
China already has the world’s fastest supercomputer, the
Sunway TaihuLight, which captured the title in the 2016 and 2017 at a
competition in Frankfurt, Germany.
Monroe, the Maryland physicist, said China had set a goal
of fully constructing the quantum research center within two years.
“If it costs $10 billion, China will just do it without
asking, and they’ll put an army together to do it,” Monroe said. “I don’t think
any other government in the world is able to throw together something (so)
fast.”
Google, IBM and Microsoft all see huge opportunity in
quantum computing and fund research labs. Commercial applications may include
determining how polymers go together, mapping the genome, finding oil in
complex geology, detecting cancer and handling air traffic.
Quantum computers can sift through vast amounts of data.
One that handles 60 quantum bits, or units of quantum information, could hold
64 exabytes of data – 2,560 times more than all the material managed by the
Library of Congress, which has 838 miles of bookshelves.
Military applications are vast and range beyond breaking
enemy encryption to include quantum-enabled weaponry, navigation systems that
can’t be jammed, and the use of quantum-powered artificial intelligence in war
fighting.
In those areas, China is not believed to have an
advantage.
“The point is, they are some distance from that quantum
supremacy threshold,” said Arthur Herman, who leads the technology and defense
program at the Hudson Institute.
Still, Herman called for U.S. policymakers to focus hard
on the quantum challenge.
“We need a Manhattan Project style funding focus in order
for a national quantum initiative to succeed,” Herman said, referring to the
World War II era program to produce the first nuclear weapon.
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