| Quantum computing is still for the most part highly theoretical — to hear veterans of the field tell it, it could be decades away from practical use — but that might make it even more of a pressing policy issue now. A report published Tuesday by the Center For Data Innovation think tank urges the government to reauthorize and fund the 2018 Quantum Initiative Act, warning the U.S. risks losing ground in its global leadership in the field without it. That bill directed more than $1.2 billion to strengthen quantum research, and launched the National Quantum Coordination Office and National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee to coordinate and assess the government’s efforts. “From the angle of how the United States compares to its allies and adversaries, surprisingly, a lot of other countries are doing really ambitious initiatives,” Hodan Omaar, the author of the center’s report, told me last week, citing the European Union’s €1 billion Quantum Technologies Flagship program and the United Kingdom’s National Quantum Technologies Programme. Like in most other areas of computer technology, the wealth and brainpower of Silicon Valley gives America a major leg up when it comes to quantum. But the technology is so complicated, and the transformations it might promise are still so far in the future, that the tech world and Washington alike are concerned with getting it right — and establishing American dominance — now, before scrappier or more determined actors (i.e., China) challenge the status quo. Omaar’s report makes 10 explicit recommendations for Congress if it reauthorizes NQIA, including appropriating at least $525 million annually for it, funding quantum “moonshot” collaborations with allied nations, and boosting education to develop a quantum workforce. But in addition to being a straightforward piece of advocacy, Omaar’s report is also a helpfully comprehensive guide to where America is on quantum policy and how we got here. She traces the field back to the National Science Foundation’s first workshop on the subject in 1999, which provided what is one of the best definitions of the field: The investigation of “how certain fundamental laws of physics discovered earlier in this century can be harnessed to dramatically improve the acquisition, transmission, and processing of information.” By 2018, when former President Trump signed the NQIA into law, scientific and political developments had turned a research curio into something for which the federal government was willing to, well… authorize $1.2 billion in taxpayer money. Demonstrations of quantum supremacy — the ability of a quantum computer to solve a mathematical problem a traditional computer can't — by Google and the University of Science and Technology of China were right around the corner, and concerns over China’s ability to use quantum systems to break cryptography grew to match the overall hawkish geopolitical climate. Omaar and her peers are concerned that the political will to fund quantum has waned since then, and they’re not alone. A Republican staffer for the House Science, Space and Technology Committee Research and Technology Subcommittee said during a recent webinar that although the funding authorized via last year’s CHIPS and Science Act will continue to power quantum R&D, she doubts any legislation will mandate spending. (Like the rest of the research priorities in last year’s bill, quantum still has not been funded to the authorized level.) Which invites the question: What does that spending actually do? Much of it goes to boosting interdisciplinary research, which is especially important in a nascent field that combines such disparate elements as computer science, experimental physics, and cryogenics. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory, for example, boasts state-of-the-art quantum equipment, but the amount of time available to use it falls woefully short of researcher demand. A 2021 Department of Energy report noted that “access to comparable facilities is more extensive in other countries, especially in Europe,” and “supporting resources such as the number of staff scientists available to assist both university and industrial users of these complex facilities are more extensive outside the U.S.” Omaar says she’s bullish on quantum’s commercial applications despite the very early stage of its development — and furthermore, that the U.S. needs to give them a boost, writing in her report that “U.S. policy is not sufficiently focused on supporting nearterm quantum applications” contra countries like the U.K. and Canada. “To get to the point that we're building these very large and very powerful systems, you need private sector buy-in to create a cycle of investment,” Omaar said. “There’s been much more of a recognition of the need to focus on commercializable quantum applications, and so I really hope to see that in the next generation, and I think we will.” (More on that in tomorrow’s DFD when I interview Alan Baratz, CEO of the commercial quantum company D-Wave, for the next installment of The Future In 5 Questions.)
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