After several decades of research, quantum studies are translating into commercialization, which Australia wants to capture on its shores.
“Quantum computing is not some far off technology,” said Maja Cassidy, principal researcher at Microsoft in partnership with The University of Sydney. Cassidy spoke at a recent webinar hosted by Australia's national science agency, CSIRO. “Microsoft has announced a limited preview of Azure Quantum … that lets our customers and partners access real qubit hardware in the Cloud. So businesses will be able to apply quantum computing technologies to their specific problems.”
Last spring, CSIRO reported its roadmap for Australia's quantum technology industry. The agency then broadcasted the webinar, in May 2020, for further discussion of the roadmap.
According to the roadmap, the quantum technology global market is projected to reach AUD$86 billion by 2040. Over AUD$4 billion of that revenue could be generated in Australia in areas of computing, sensor and measurement, and communications.
“Since 2019 the UK, US, EU, India, Germany, and Russia have established multibillion [AUD] dollar scale quantum technology initiatives. And there's even reports that China has put in about [USD]$10 billion towards quantum R&D,” said CSIRO Chief Scientist Cathy Foley, in her introduction at the webinar. “So for us to maintain leadership and capture this opportunity it's really important that we have this national conversation … about having a coordinated, collaborative, and cooperative approach to growing our domestic quantum economy.”
Artist's impression of an atom qubit in silicon being protected from charge noise. Credit: Tony Melov.
Quantum ecosystem
Similar to other countries that support quantum R&D as a megaproject, the CSIRO roadmap emphasizes collaboration across government, academia, and industry. During the webinar Cassidy also emphasized the need for international collaboration in order to reach commercial success.
Webinar panelist Phil Morle is a Partner at the CSIRO's venture capital fund, Main Sequence Ventures. “[The technology companies] that are growing really well are working very closely with industry to try and find some kind of quantum advantage together to actually understand what that is whilst they're making the technology,” Morle said.
While acknowledging that error-corrective quantum computing will not be realized yet for some years, the panel highlighted near-term economic opportunities. Among these is semiconductor consumer technology, according to Andrew White, director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, where close to 200 scientists across the country are working to build quantum machines. “Today in Korea, Samsung has released the Quantum Galaxy Phone…. It's a $500 US, so about $800 Australian, phone that has a quantum random number generator built into it,” White said. “You know research takes about 30 years, technology takes 20 years, and then things suddenly get fast and valuable.”
Morle pointed out that the market is unfolding at the same time as the technology is being built. The first quantum company he invested in is Q-CTRL, headquartered in Sydney and founded by co-panelist Michael J. Biercuk. “All a company like Q-CTRL can do is be in that market,” Morle said, “… adjusting their business around the technology at the same time.”
To build quantum industry in Australia, the roadmap emphasizes the need to attract and keep the best talent within the country. White said, “One of the startups in Silicon Valley at the moment, in photonic quantum computing, is a company called PsiQuantum started by a couple of Australians who did their undergraduate [PhDs and postdocs] in Australia.” The startup has raised about USD$435 million and is valued at USD$4.5 billion, according to White. “We're exporting great people,” he said. “What we need to do is develop an ecosystem where we can retain them so they can flourish here.”
Morle agreed, saying that companies in Australia need to be appropriately funded in order to attract talent.
Quantum industry insights
In order to compete globally, Australia's quantum industry needs to work fast—including international collaborations that enable this speed—and pull together resources from academia, government, and industry, according to the panelists. They advocated for government funding, an encumbered IP so that university work and industry or entrepreneurial work is separate, and international collaboration that utilizes expertise globally in addition to national expertise in order to compete globally.
Michelle Simmons, Scientia Professor and Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, director of the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at ARC, and the founding director of startup company Silicon Quantum Computing Pty. Ltd. (SQC), described the global competition as “the case of the tortoise and the hare. We very much see ourselves as a tortoise in this game.”
Launched in 2017, the stated goals of SQC are a 10-qubit prototype quantum integrated processor by 2023, a 100-qubit quantum processor with error correction before 2030, and a universal quantum computer by the mid-2030s. SQC specializes in precisely positioning phosphorus atom qubits hosted in silicon. Qubits in this type of semiconductor platform are sensitive to charge noise. In August, Simmons's research group reported a significant reduction in charge noise. According to their news release, the researchers revealed that the presence of defects either within the silicon chip or at the interface to the surface were significant contributors to the charge noise. They published this latest work in Advanced Materials (doi:10.1002/adma.202003361).
During the webinar, Simmons said that Google and IBM quantum systems use the superconductor platform, which will run into problems during scale-up. She believes the strength in her company is in developing atomically engineered qubits where they “can engineer each aspect of the actual device itself. This allows us to focus on generating the best quality qubits, the lowest noise qubits, and the fastest qubits.”
“The potential of quantum is going to be pervasive,” said Foley. “We're already seeing it, and it's accelerating.”
