Quantum News Briefs July 18:
EU urged to prepare for quantum cyber attacks
The paper A quantum cybersecurity agenda for Europe emphasized the urgent need for a new EU Coordinated Action Plan to facilitate quantum-secured technologies before ‘Q-Day’ – the point at which quantum computers are able to break existing cryptographic algorithms.
Experts believe this will occur in the next five to 10 years, potentially leaving all digital information vulnerable to cyber-threat actors under current encryption protocols.
Rodríguez said that the impact of quantum computing has been “mainly left out of the conversation” at an EU policy level. This includes a lack of strategy on dealing with short-term threats, such as ‘harvest attacks.’ This is where cyber-criminals are already extracting encrypted data in anticipation of Q Day.
The paper set out six recommendations for an EU quantum cybersecurity agenda:
1) Establishing an EU Coordinated Action Plan on the quantum transition
2) Establishing a new expert group within the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity with seconded national experts to exchange good practices and identify obstacles to the transition to post-quantum encryption
3) Assisting in setting priorities for the transition to post-quantum encryption and pushing for cryptographic agility to respond to emerging vulnerabilities
4) Facilitating political coordination between the European Commission, member states, national security agencies and ENISA to determine technological priorities and identify use cases for quantum-safe technologies.
5) Facilitating technical coordination at the EU level to address research gaps in quantum-safe technologies
)Exploring the use of sandboxes to accelerate the development of near-term applications of quantum information technologies. Click here to read the original article in-entirety.
Unleashing the power of quantum computing: The imperative for application research
van Velzen explains, “To make quantum computers useful, despite all their limitations, we must emphasize the criticality of extensive application research. Applied research goes beyond developing isolated quantum algorithms. It focuses on identifying applications that can genuinely benefit from a quantum approach and integrating quantum technologies into existing computational workflows. Note that this will not be easy. It must deal with complex matters in an interdisciplinary environment of quantum information scientists, domain knowledge experts and business owners. It must deal with the limits of today’s quantum computers while building tomorrow’s applications, all with uncertain specifications and timelines.”
Given the steep and interdisciplinary learning curve, companies should expect several years before becoming quantum-ready. However, with the high pace of current developments, that time might be now. Benefits go beyond capability and knowledge development, too. Essential technologies must be developed to integrate quantum computing into workflows. Additionally, application research serves as a compass for the quantum industry. By understanding the computational requirements companies face, they can influence the direction of research and guarantee systems support industry requirements.
van Velzen closes with: There is urgent need for dedicated teams comprised of chemists, material scientists and computational experts to bridge the gap between theoretical advancements and practical applications. If we want to prevent the transformative power of quantum computing from going unused while companies are still getting ready, then initiating application research today is key. Click here to read entire article.
Duality Quantum Accelerator accepts four startups into latest Cohort
Duality is led by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago and the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE), along with founding partners, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Argonne National Laboratory, and P33.
Duality Director Ezunial (Eze) Burts III said, “We are excited to welcome four startups into the third cohort of Duality, and galvanize our powerful ecosystem to equip these innovators with the resources needed to scale their businesses. Not only will they rapidly develop quantum technology to tackle real-world problems, they will also create jobs and high-performing teams that will generate economic impact across the city of Chicago, the broader region, and across the globe.”
Duality Cohort 3:
- Icarus Quantum (Boulder, Colorado) is developing scalable solutions for a secure quantum internet. Its disruptive technology can generate quantum light reliably and efficiently, in contrast to other generators in the market that work only a fraction of the time and limit the reach of quantum networks.
- Ingenii (New York, New York) is on a mission to accelerate the adoption of quantum computing within high-impact life and environmental science use cases. It is doing this by bringing together quantum algorithm content with consumers in a ready-to-use format with benchmarking and error mitigation, enhanced with automation and AI.
- Ki3 Photonics (Montreal, Canada) is developing photonics hardware for the generation and processing of broadband quantum signals. Its offering solves the problem of scalability, energy consumption, and distribution efficiency of quantum photonics signals over optical fiber networks.
- reOrbital (Hermosa Beach, California) is using a logistical innovation to be the first company to mass produce products in microgravity at scale. By unlocking microgravity manufacturing, reOrbital enables improvements in optics, nanomaterials, and semiconductors, accelerating the growth of quantum.
Simple data gets the most out of quantum machine learning
The finding paves a path to maximizing the usability of today’s noisy, intermediate-scale quantum computers for simulating quantum systems and other tasks better than classical digital computers, while also offering promise for optimizing quantum sensors.
“We show that surprisingly simple data in a small amount is sufficient to train a quantum neural network,” said Lukasz Cincio, a quantum theorist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a co-author of the paper containing the proof published in the journal Nature Communications. “This work takes another step in the direction of making quantum machine learning easier, more accessible and more near-term.”
“In practical terms, it means you can train a neural network on not only just a few pictures of cats, for example, but also on very simple pictures,” Cincio said. “For quantum simulations, it means you can train on quantumly simple states.”
“Those states are easy to prepare, which makes the entire learning algorithm much easier to run on near-term quantum computers,” said co-author Zoe Holmes, professor of physics at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and former Los Alamos postdoc.
The new paper shows that using simpler data allows a less-complex quantum circuit to prepare a given quantum state on the computer, such as a quantum-chemistry simulation showing the evolution of a system of molecules. A simple circuit is easy to implement, less noisy and thus able to complete a computation. The new Nature Communications paper demonstrates a method for compiling quantum machine-learning algorithms using simple-to-prepare states. Click to read the comprehensive article in-entirety in HomeLandSecurityToday.
Sandra K. Helsel, Ph.D. has been researching and reporting on frontier technologies since 1990. She has her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.