Recently, the White House Science and Technology Policy Office launched the national strategic plan for the development of quantum information science and technology labor force, which aims to promote the education and promotion of advanced technology and cultivate the next generation of quantum information science talents, so as to keep up with the growing employment in the field of Quantum Science.
At present, the transformation of scientific research achievements, industrial application innovation, supply chain construction and human resource training of quantum information technology have become the main development direction of major countries in the world. According to incomplete statistics of China information and Communication Research Institute, as of October 2021, the total investment scale of countries around the world in quantum has exceeded 13 billion US dollars (about 82.6 billion yuan).
Quantum information technology can be divided into three branches: quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum precision measurement. Anxin Securities pointed out in the research report that quantum communication is the closest technology to commercialization in quantum information technology. Quantum computing and quantum measurement are far from commercialization .
Dr. Zhou Lei, the project director, told scidev.net daily that quantum communication has been relatively perfect in technology and scientific research theory because of its relatively long development time. Therefore, it will go faster in industrialization.
Zhang Shengyu, head of Tencent quantum laboratory, pointed out that although quantum computing still has a long time from theory to implementation. However, in the last decade, quantum computing has made leapfrog progress, and the future is still worth looking forward to.
quantum communication competition, China temporarily leads
According to the quantum communication industry analysis report released by Morgan Stanley, the compound annual growth rate of the global quantum communication market from 2020 to 2030 is 50%, reaching US $21 billion in 2030. However, Morgan Stanley also pointed out that the premise for to reach this scale is that quantum computing can usher in the door to break through the traditional encryption technology by 2025.
One of the key characteristics of quantum communication is the security it can provide. We can use the laws of quantum physics to protect data. These laws allow particles (usually photons, which are used to transmit data along an optical cable) to assume a superposition state, which means that they can represent multiple combinations of 1 and 0 at the same time. These particles are called qubits or qubits.
From the perspective of network security, if hackers try to observe the existence of qubits in the transportation process, the super fragile quantum state will “collapse” to 1 or 0. Therefore, many companies use this feature to create quantum optical fiber networks to transmit highly sensitive data in the process of quantum key distribution (QKD). Although small, it has been put into commercial use.
Another form of quantum communication is to transmit data in quantum form completely based on entangled quantum phenomena. The working principle of quantum long-distance transmission is to create pairs of entangled photons, and then send each pair of entangled photons to the sender of data and the other pair to the receiver. No matter how far away, the change of one particle will cause the change of another particle. This is Einstein’s famous “long-distance weird action”. unlike QKD, which has been put into commercial use, this form of quantum communication is still in the laboratory stage .
Morgan Stanley pointed out that China is the first country to reach a key quantum milestone, and Japan and South Korea are also ahead of the efforts of the European Union and the United States in quantum communication. China is the most advanced in terms of commercial use. At present, China is trying to establish the first global quantum communication network around 2030 by connecting dozens of quantum satellites with the ground quantum communication network. Kyushu quantum, Quantumctek Co.Ltd(688027) and Wentian quantum are three Chinese enterprises that master the core technology of quantum communication.
Dr. Zhou Lei, project director of Quantumctek Co.Ltd(688027) told the reporter of science and Innovation Board Daily: China’s quantum communication leads the world, while quantum computing is in parallel.
In terms of scientific research, China’s 200km and 404km optical fiber mdi-qkd (measurement equipment independent quantum key distribution) experiments in 2014 and 2016 were the world record of QKD safe distance at that time; In March 2020, China successfully set a new world record for the longest distance of ground-based quantum key distribution, Quantumctek Co.Ltd(688027) and developed optical modulation and logic control modules for experimental design.
In 2021, Quantumctek Co.Ltd(688027) combined with the research team of China University of science and technology and Jinan Institute of quantum technology, used the existing commercial optical fiber link to break through the on-site long-distance high-performance single photon interference technology, and adopted two technical schemes to realize 500 km double field quantum key distribution (tf-qkd), creating a Shanghai New World Co.Ltd(600628) record of on-site relay free optical fiber quantum key distribution transmission distance.
synchronization of application and network construction is the key
Zhou Lei pointed out that the industrialization of quantum communication has developed for a relatively long time and has been relatively perfect in technology and scientific research theory. Moreover, quantum communication is not as complex as quantum computing, so it goes faster and farther in industrialization. At present, China’s development focus is to promote large-scale application and network construction and realize the mode of application driven industry.
It is reported that China has achieved a total of more than 7000 kilometers of practical optical fiber quantum secure communication network, of which more than 6000 kilometers use Quantumctek Co.Ltd(688027) products and are in online operation.
“It is expected that in the next few years, China’s optical fiber quantum communication network will be formed, extending to Heilongjiang in the north, Hainan in the south, Chengdu in the West and Shanghai in the East, basically covering China’s large regions and cities .” Zhou Lei said.
Zhou Lei stressed that practical quantum communication needs to be synchronized with application and network construction, and a global wide area quantum communication network system needs to be built. The development route of wide area quantum communication network is to realize the metropolitan quantum communication network through optical fiber, the connection between two adjacent cities through repeater, and the connection between remote areas through the transfer of satellite platform.
This is similar to our mobile communication network. As the network coverage becomes more and more dense, mobile phones will become more and more useful. if the coverage and breadth of the communication network are not enough, the application can only be local and small-scale, and there is no foundation for large-scale development. with the popularization of quantum communication network construction, more applications will be driven, and then further driven from the application to a more detailed and dense direction. The application and network construction are such a way of circular promotion.
At present, China’s quantum communication technology has been applied in many fields such as finance, government affairs and electric power. Zhou Lei said that the next step is to strive for miniaturization and generalization, realize longer-distance and more stable transmission , and further expand from the key infrastructure of the country such as government, finance, power and energy, so as to be applied to a wider range of people’s livelihood.
quantum computing will not completely replace classical computing
In the research report, the Chinese Academy of communications pointed out that superconducting quantum computing is considered by the industry as one of the technical routes that may realize universal quantum computing, and IBM and Google continue to make efforts in this field.
IBM released 127 qubit superconducting quantum computer “Eagle” in 2021, and plans to launch 1123 “vulture” platforms in 2023, with a goal of reaching millions by 2030. Google plans to achieve 1000 physical qubits in 2023 and millions of physical qubits in 2029.
In China, Tencent, Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba and other enterprises have carried out research on quantum computing.
Zhang Shengyu, head of Tencent quantum lab, told the scidev.net daily that at present, the potential application scenarios of quantum computing include molecular chemical property research, financial analysis, traffic scheduling, aerodynamics, artificial intelligence optimization and so on. Although there is still a long time from theory to implementation, the future is worth looking forward to.
“Especially in the last decade, quantum computing has made leapfrog progress. International giants will release some big products every 1 or 2 years. From a global perspective, quantum information has an accelerating trend. I hope all countries will concentrate their efforts and really promote and land science and technology.”
According to Dr. Yang Weifeng, senior engineer, there are research groups in China on the main physical implementation systems of quantum computing. In the field of light quantum computing, pan Jianwei team of China University of science and technology has always been at the international leading level. In 2017, pan Jianwei’s team built the first light quantum computing prototype that surpassed the early classic computers. In 2020, pan Jianwei’s team successfully constructed the “nine chapters” of a 76 photon, 100 mode Gaussian Bose sampling quantum computing prototype, making China the second country to realize the advantages of quantum computing.
In terms of superconducting quantum computing, China started late, but developed rapidly. In 2021, pan Jianwei’s team successfully developed the 66 bit programmable superconducting quantum computing prototype zuchong-2, which realized the rapid solution of the sampling task of quantum random lines.
Yang Weifeng said that according to the existing theory, the speed of Zu Chongzhi’s quantum random sampling problem is seven orders of magnitude faster than the fastest supercomputer at present; The computational complexity is six orders of magnitude higher than that of Google’s “sycamore” superconducting quantum computer, marking that China has also reached the international leading level in the field of superconducting quantum computing, which makes China the only country to achieve quantum superiority milestones in both optical and superconducting physical systems.
In Yang Weifeng’s view, unlike classical computing , quantum computing uses qubits for coding, can be in the superposition state of 0 and 1, and has the ability of parallel computing. The computing power increases exponentially with the number of controllable particles, so its computing power is much higher than classical computing Big data analysis and other applications that need strong computing power can provide support.
However, Yang Weifeng also stressed that quantum computing and classical computing are complementary and will not completely replace classical computing, but reflect the advantages on some specific problems. For example, Zu Chongzhi did better than classical calculations in the problem of quantum random walk and in the problem of Bose sampling in Chapter 9.
It is reported that in the research and development process of superconducting quantum computing, Quantumctek Co.Ltd(688027) participated in the research and development of hardware and software, and participated in the research and development of measurement and control software in software; In terms of hardware, I participated in the research and development of measurement and control system and chip packaging. In terms of the industrialization of quantum computing, Quantumctek Co.Ltd(688027) launched the 2021 superconducting quantum computing control system ez-q engine, which serves teams such as the Institute of physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Southern University of science and technology.
commercialization of quantum computing may take another 20 years
Compared with quantum communication, quantum computing still has a long way to go from commercialization.
Yang Weifeng admitted that quantum computing is still in the stage of transformation from basic scientific research to functionalization. It may take 20 years or more to really move towards practicality. At present, there are still many problems to be solved.
First of all, if quantum computing is to be expanded on a large scale, the problem of quantum error correction must be solved. At present, the physical bits are not so perfect and will produce some errors; The second is the integration and control of large-scale systems. The control system of quantum computing is still huge. If we want to form general quantum computing, it may need to be as large as a football field, so integration and miniaturization are very big challenges; Third, we also need quantum algorithms with practical value to provide support.
