Matt Langione, a Principal at the Boston Consulting Group, authored one of the most frequently cited publications on the topic of quantum computing’s value to business and society, “Where Will Quantum Computers Create Value –and When?”, which forms the basis for a TED talk that will be released in 2021. As part of BCG’s “deep tech” initiative, he advises Fortune 500 companies on building quantum computing into their digital transformation roadmaps and is writing a series of articles on the topic by industry (“Will Quantum Computing Transform BioPharma RD?” and “It’s Time for Financial Institutions to Place Their Quantum Bets” are the first installments). He has addressed audiences at all the major conferences in the field (Q2B, IBM Q Summit, AI World, IEEE). He is a member of the U.S. Government’s Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C). Beyond quantum computing, Matt publishes regularly on AI, startups and other topics at the nexus of science, business and policy.

QLM is a start-up out of the quantum photonics group at the University of Bristol. We are using time correlated single-photon counting to develop highly accurate, long range, and low-cost infrared LiDAR cameras that can see and measure greenhouse gases. The natural gas industry has made major commitments towards effective methane emissions monitoring and compliance with expanding regulation, but existing equipment remains inadequate for wide scale deployment. We are working with industry leaders including BP, National Grid, and Ametek, to validate and industrialize our designs as cost-effective scalable systems for continuous and fully autonomous leak detection and quantification.

Quantum Key Distribution or QKD is the much-heralded first fruit of the upcoming quantum revolution, which promises more accurate timing, more secure communications, more sensitive imaging and sensing, and of course more power computing. QKD has the potential to offer ultra-secure communications, but there are several other, more cost-effective options. The talk will assess the landscape pragmatically, presenting recent customer trials of both QKD and post-quantum crypto solutions. The major QKD use cases being explored in the AIRQKD collaborative project will be described and innovative Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) technology will be applied where relevant to supplement QKD in access environments.

Quantum communication leverages the physical properties of entanglement and superposition to create networks capable of connecting quantum computers, sensors, and secure nodes. Photons are a particularly viable information vehicle as they are unaffected by a broad range of environmental variables.  They are also very versatile, supporting the teleportation of quantum information upon interacting with information-carrying qubits, whether these qubits are generated by a quantum computer or a random qubit source. Existing and emerging technologies will be discussed, as well as perspectives on the open challenges of the field.

General purpose quantum computers will utilize millions of physical qubits, thus requiring an underlying qubit technology that can be manufactured at scale. Integrated silicon photonics is an intrinsically scalable and manufacturable platform where all necessary gates are available to manipulate qubits, encoded in photons, with very high fidelity and low noise. In this talk, we will discuss architectures for fault-tolerant quantum computing with photonics in the newly-introduced fusion-based quantum computing paradigm. Fusion-based quantum computing presents a new framework for fault-tolerant quantum computation, focused on the efficient integration of quantum error correction and physical-level hardware operations. Its primitives, small entangled resource states and projective entangling gates, make it particularly useful in an integrated photonics platform, offering significant architectural simplifications and reducing requirements on physical level operations.

When systems are engineered to relay or extend “quantum weirdness” from the nanoscopic scale of atoms to the macroscopic scale of humans amazing things can happen. In the last century humans engineered periodic atomic lattices with quantized electronic energies to create semiconductors with bandgaps, thereby enabling the transistor. Similarly, humans captured photons and optical gain media in cavities to create photonic Bose-Einstein condensates, i.e., lasers. These twentieth century quantum systems (the transistor and the laser) ushered in the computer age and the information age, which changed the world. The twenty-first century generation of quantum systems is just emerging, and the disruptive potential is equally tantalizing. Almost all these emergent quantum systems require lasers and photonics, representing both an opportunity and a challenge. In this talk I will discuss the complexity of the lasers-for-quantum space, present the technical and economic landscape, and pose possible paths forward for how lasers and photonics can usher in a new quantum age.

It was the photon that started the world of quantum in 1905, when Einstein took seriously a concept introduced by Planck and such proposed the laser. Soon, photons seen as exchange particles for the electromagnetic force triggered QED and Feynman to postulate quantum machines. Discovery of photon’s quantum statistical properties led to the understanding and practical technical use of quantum correlations, entanglement and quantum coherence. The photon is the most accessible handle for quantum information. It is used to set and read-out qubits, quantum sensors, etc. It is the only carrier to allow large distance transport of quantum information. Tamed photons are the key enabling tool for Quantum 2.0 and today’s laser are an incarnation thereof, as basis for QT applications we can only start to anticipate.

This talk will discuss how the Quantum “industry” might develop based on fifty-some years of laser industry history. Doing so is not easy given we have to parse through truth and over-exuberant truth on quantum computing. Initial growth of the laser industry came from the development of new lasers and instruments to enable RD. Growth accelerated as real applications were adopted. Funding for quantum technology development will come from governments and big-tech. There will be ample startup companies to supply tools but only a few will succeed. The likelihood is there will be more mergers and tech transfer.