Martin Laforest, IQC’s senior manager of scientific outreach, shows off “the behemoth” — a $5-million instrument that produces quantum materials in the form of crystals and thin films, one layer of atoms at a time


run its jet aircraft. Transportation experts say it could vastly improve analyses of traffic patterns in the air and on the ground. And Google is said to be using quantum computers to help its self-driving cars cope with the massive quantity of real-time data that must be processed each second in order to navigate safely. Other potential breakthroughs, still under investigation, tug


at the imagination. Take quantum teleportation, for example. Although the science is light-years away from the transporters that made Star Trek so compelling (“Beam me up, Scotty”), last year scientists in the Netherlands successfully teleported infor- mation from one quantum bit to another over a distance of


several metres. (The key word here is “information”; data about the quantum state gets teleported, not physical matter.) More tangible is Canada’s head start in tackling these prob-


lems. When universities and institutes in other countries were just beginning to acknowledge quantum computation as a field of study about a dozen years ago, Canada was already going full steam ahead. Waterloo and IQC are leading the way, but there’s also important work being done at the University of Toronto, the University of Calgary, Simon Fraser University and beyond. On the national level, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research hosts a Quantum Information Science program (with


JUNE/JULY 2015 | CPA MAGAZINE | 45


Paul Orenstein


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