Britain’s plans to create advanced devices based on the mind-bending physics of the quantum world have received a £100m boost, in a move ministers hope will have a transformative impact on healthcare, transport and national security.
Peter Kyle, the science secretary has announced funds to establish five quantum technology hubs across England and Scotland. They will work with industry and government to develop and commercialise devices and ultimately drive a new economy.
“We are at the foothills of where quantum technology is going to take us and that provides a huge opportunity for British science and British research and development,” Kyle told the Guardian from Glasgow before Friday’s announcement. “If we get this right, we can become global leaders, which means not just solving challenges domestically and creating opportunities domestically, but being able to fully exploit the global market as well.”
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The hubs, based in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Oxford and London, will aim to build the next generation of devices, from brain-scanner helmets and gravity sensors that detect underground pipes to quantum-enhanced blood tests that catch diseases early, and global positioning and precision-timing services that do not rely on GPS.
In one project, scientists at UCL are fine-tuning the quantum properties of atomic defects in diamond nanoparticles to develop ultra-sensitive blood tests. The technology allows scientists to draw a blood sample and detect minuscule amounts of proteins or DNA by making them flash like the beam from a lighthouse.
“A whole new generation of quantum sensors is beginning to appear and our hub is going to harness those to transform early diagnosis and treatment, where it has applications across cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s and infectious diseases,” said Prof John Morton at UCL. “We’re really excited about translating these weird and wonderful quantum sensors into practical applications that patients will benefit from.”
At the University of Birmingham, scientists are exploiting a quantum effect known as superposition to build gravity sensors that detect underground infrastructure. Such sensors could alert utilities companies to gas and water mains where they plan to dig, or help them find their own pipes to repair.
“Rather than lots of digging to find things – and lots of holes are dug in the wrong place – we can in principle find the infrastructure quicker,” said Prof Michael Holynski at Birmingham university. “We have already detected tunnels and pipes with the sensor we have in the hub. What we want to do in the next phase is make it something that can move quickly, and more accurately inspect the underground.”
£100M is the sort of money that’s good to incubate a few startups, but what happens in the UK is we let promising companies get to the 50-100 people size and then don’t support them beyond that. We let them get bought by global tech giants. If we don’t help companies get through SME to large business transition we’ll always be a feeding ground for other country’s tech industries.
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I was disappointed/intrigued to find that the technology behind quantum computers was essentially a “brute-force” strategy. The way the media describe it you’d think that the tech involved sub-atomic particles being manipulated such that they were entangled and enabled to express superposition of states.
The truth is that quantum computers are conventional supercomputers that have been programmed to emulate these qualities of quantum mechanics. Regular 1s and 0s are being used to express potential configurations of superpositional states and entanglement in a virtualised environment. Despite this research in the field appears to be fruitful in terms of providing an alternative paradigm to crunch numbers for certain problems. I predict that the applications will continue to be specific instead of general for a very long time. Maybe strong encryption can be broken but they won’t be able to do much else after being tuned to perform that one task.
