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In the curious world of quantum mechanics, a single atom or subatomic particle can exist simultaneously in multiple conditions. A new UC-led, multiuniversity institute will explore the realities of this emerging field as it focuses on advancing quantum science and engineering, with an additional goal of training a future workforce to build and use quantum computers.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $25 million over five years to establish the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute (QLCI) for Present and Future Quantum Computation as part of the federal governments effort to speed the development of quantum computers. The institute will work to overcome scientific challenges to achieving quantum computing and will design advanced, large-scale quantum computers that employ state-of-the-art scientific algorithms developed by the researchers.

There is a sense that we are on the precipice of a really big move toward quantum computing, said Dan Stamper-Kurn, UC Berkeley professor of physics and director of the institute. We think that the development of the quantum computer will be a real scientific revolution, the defining scientific challenge of the moment, especially if you think about the fact that the computer plays a central role in just about everything society does. If you have a chance to revolutionize what a computer is, then you revolutionize just about everything else.

Unlike conventional computers, quantum computers seek to harness the mysterious behavior of particles at the subatomic level to boost computing power. Once fully developed, they could be capable of solving large, extremely complex problems far beyond the capacity of todays most powerful supercomputers. Quantum systems are expected to have a wide variety of applications in many fields, including medicine, national security and science.

Theoretical work has shown that quantum computers are the best way to do some important tasks: factoring large numbers, encrypting or decrypting data, searching databases or finding optimal solutions for problems. Using quantum mechanical principles to process information offers an enormous speedup over the time it takes to solve many computational problems on current digital computers.

Scientific problems that would take the age of the universe to solve on a standard computer potentially could take only a few minutes on a quantum computer, said Eric Hudson, a UCLA professor of physics and co-director of the new institute. We may get the ability to design new pharmaceuticals to fight diseases on a quantum computer, instead of in a laboratory. Learning the structure of molecules and designing effective drugs, each of which has thousands of atoms, are inherently quantum challenges. A quantum computer potentially could calculate the structure of molecules and how molecules react and behave.

The project came to fruition, in part, thanks to a UC-wide consortium, the California Institute for Quantum Entanglement, funded by UCs Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI).The MRPI funding opportunity incentivizes just this kind of multicampus collaboration in emerging fields that can position UC as a national leader.

This new NSF institute is founded on the outstanding research contributions in theoretical and experimental quantum information science achieved by investigators from across the UC system through our initiative to foster multicampus collaborations, said Theresa Maldonado, Ph.D., vice president for Research and Innovation of the University of California. The award recognizes the teams vision of how advances in computational quantum science can reveal new fundamental understanding of phenomena at the tiniest length-scale that can benefit innovations in artificial intelligence, medicine, engineering, and more. We are proud to lead the nation in engaging excellent students from diverse backgrounds into this field of study.

The QLCI for Present and Future Quantum Computation connects UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Santa Barbara with five other universities around the nation and in California. The institute will draw on a wealth of knowledge from experimental and theoretical quantum scientists to improve and determine how best to use todays rudimentary quantum computers, most of them built by private industry or government labs. The goal, ultimately, is to make quantum computers as common as mobile phones, which are, after all, pocket-sized digital computers.

The institute will be multidisciplinary, spanning physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, and optical and electrical engineering, among other fields, and will include scientists and engineers with expertise in quantum algorithms, mechanics and chemistry. They will partner with outside institutions, including in the emerging quantum industry, and will host symposia, workshops and other programs. Research challenges will be addressed jointly through a process that incorporates both theory and experiment.

Situated near the heart of todays computer industry, Silicon Valley and Silicon Beach, and at major California universities and national labs, the institute will train a future workforce akin to the way computer science training at universities fueled Silicon Valleys rise to become a tech giant. UCLA will pilot a masters degree program in quantum science and technology to train a quantum-smart workforce, while massive online courses, or MOOCs, will help spread knowledge and understanding of quantum computers even to high school students.

This center establishes California as a leader nationally and globally in quantum computing, Stamper-Kurn said.

The institutes initial members are all senior faculty from UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, the California Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Southern California, the University of Washington and the University of Texas at Austin.

We still do not know fully what quantum computers do well, Stamper-Kurn said, and we face deep challenges that arise in scaling up quantum devices. The mission of this institute is to address fundamental challenges in the development of the quantum computer.

More information on NSF-supported research on quantum information science and engineering is available at nsf.gov/quantum.

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New UC-led institute awarded $25M to explore potential of quantum computing and train a future workforce - University of California

PQShield, a spin-out from the UK's Oxford University, is developing advanced cryptographic solutions for hardware, software and communications to protect businesses' data from the quantum threat.

The development of quantum computers poses a cybersecurity problem such as the IT industry has never seen before. All stored data currently deemed secure by modern standards whether that's health records, financial data, customer databases and even critical government infrastructure could, in theory, be cracked by quantum computers, which are capable of effectively short circuiting the encryption we've used to protect that data until now.

Efforts to protect our data from the quantum threat are underway, though whether the issue is being looked at with the urgency it deserves is up for debate. PQShield, a post-quantum cryptography startup spun out of Oxford University, perceives a disconnect between the scale of the threat and the current cyber-readiness of most businesses in 2020, which it is now trying to address.

SEE: Quantum computing: Myths v. Realities (TechRepublic)

"The scale of the quantum attack is just too big to imagine," Dr. Ali Kaafarani, research fellow at Oxford's Mathematical Institute and founder of PQShield, tells TechRepublic.

"The most important part of what we're doing is to educate the market."

Kaafarani is a former engineer at Hewlett-Packard Labs and leads a team of 10 full-time quantum cryptographers, from what he estimates to be a worldwide pool of just a hundred or so. The company is busy working on the development of quantum-secure cryptography encryption solutions for hardware, software and communications that will secure information from future risk, yet can be implemented using today's technology.

This comprises a system on chip (SoC) and software development kit that allow companies to create secure messaging applications, protected by a "post-quantum" variant of the Signal cryptographic protocol. Central to PQShield's technology is that it is designed to work with both legacy systems as well as those expected in the years to come, meaning it could offer protection for everything from keyless cars and other connected devices, to data moving to and from cloud servers.

This, Kaafarani explains, is important owing to the fact that post-quantum cryptography cannot be retrospectively implemented meanwhile data encrypted by modern standards remains open to post-quantum threats. "What we're using right now as end-to-end encryption...is secure now, but people can intercept them and steal encrypted data," he says.

"Once they have access to a quantum computer, they can decrypt them, so confidentiality is threatened in retrospect, because whatever is considered confidential now can be decrypted later on."

Kaafarani also perceives an issue with the current attitudes to remediating cyberattacks, which he likens to applying a band-aid to a repeating problem.

SEE: SSL Certificate Best Practices Policy (TechRepublic Premium)

"That's why we started PQShield to fill in this gap, to lead the way to a smooth and secure transition to the quantum era. There is a real opportunity here to get things right from the beginning."

The startup recently completed a 5.5m funding round led by VC Firm Kindred Capital and has now secured German engineering company Bosch as its first OEM customer. While the exact details of the deal are still under wraps, Kaafarani says the deal is indicative of the threats businesses are beginning to identify as the age of quantum computing approaches.

"Their hardware may be built to last, but right now, their security isn't," he says.

"If you're designing a car that's going to go on the roads in the next three years, if you're doing security by design, you should be thinking of the next security standards: not the standards that are valid now, but the standards that will be valid in the next five, 10, 15 years," he says.

"Future-proofing is an imperative, just as it is for the banks and agencies that hold so much of our sensitive data."

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The future of encryption: Getting ready for the quantum computer attack - TechRepublic

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used a quantum computer and simulated a time travel model. They found that the butterfly effect did not exist in their experiment.

The researchers used a quantum computer to simulate time travel and showed that there is no butterfly effect in the quantum model. They used quantum bits and sent them to a simulated past. In this case, one of the bits was damaged during sending, but it did not damage other bits that were sent along with them.

The simulation involved two hypothetical humans, Alice and Bob, each with a qubit a quantum bit of information. During the experiment, Alice sent her qubit to the past, but at some point, Bob intervened in it and changed the information in it. However, despite the changes, Alice was able to recover the information when the qubit returned.

This way we can really see what happens to the complex quantum world if we travel through time, add a little damage and come back. We found that this does not harm the present, which means there is no butterfly effect in quantum mechanics.

Nikolay Sinitsyn, co-author of the work

The researchers repeated the experiment and found that simulating the return of a qubit to the past and inflicting damage on it has little or no effect on the information it carries. This effect can be applied in areas where quantum devices must carry secret information. Data can be hidden by transforming the original state into a confusing one.

We found that even if an attacker manipulates in a highly entangled state, we can still easily recover useful information since this damage does not increase with decoding, the scientists noted.

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Research: the butterfly effect does not exist in the quantum model - FREE NEWS