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REVIEW PHOTONICS WEST REPORT


San Francisco’s best and brightest


Justifying the hype in quantum technologies


Greg Blackman covers a quantum panel session where the technology’s potential was discussed


D


uring the Photonics West panel discussion on quantum technologies, an audience member asked


whether the global investment in quantum technologies was justified – does quantum live up to the hype surrounding it, or will it go the way of some past up-and-coming technologies that promised much but failed to deliver? There’s certainly a lot of hype surrounding quantum science, which the panellists seemed to think was justified, largely because, as noted by session chair Anke Lohmann, a quantum technologies consultant, quantum devices have been developed that actually work. Rishiraj Pravahan, principal data scientist


at AT&T Foundry, commented that there has been a critical mass of progress in quantum technologies. ‘There has been a concerted effort in the academic community,’ he said. ‘This makes it viable.’ The panellists pointed to quantum key distribution, quantum sensors, and chip- scale atomic clocks as all being commercial products or close to commercialisation. The government investment into quantum is substantial. Qiang Zhang, a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), put a rough estimate of the funding from the Chinese federal


12 Electro Optics March 2018


government as being between 5 to 10 billion RMB over five years, although he added that this is always being debated. USTC has been leading two large projects in quantum communication. The first is the successful test of free-space quantum encryption via satellite between base stations in China and Austria, as detailed in a paper in Science last year. ‘That satellite [Micius] is quite big,’ Qiang commented during the session. ‘In the future, we have a plan to launch many nanosatellites, which will constitute a network.’


Qiang added that, on the surface,


satellites seem an expensive way of setting up quantum communication networks, but actually they’re not compared to the cost of installing quantum repeaters every 100km or so over a long distance. The second project led by USTC is a


quantum link stretching 2,000km from Beijing to Shanghai, which was opened last year in cooperation with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). Other governments are investing heavily


as well. The European Commission has opened the first calls in its €1 billion quantum flagship programme that will run over 10 years, while the UK government established four quantum hubs in 2014. Lars Unnebrink, from the German engineering association, the VDI, commented during the panel discussion that the German government will be making substantial investment in quantum technologies, suggesting millions of euros a year to start with. Germany has been working on a research


agenda for more than a year, he said, with pilot projects on sensing, quantum key distribution and optical clocks. ‘Nobody wants to be left behind,’ he added. Quantum science is already a good business for photonics components suppliers. Gooch & Housego has been making revenue from quantum science for the last 17 years, noted Andrew Robertson, senior vice president at the company. Gooch & Housego is working with the


M Squared Laser’s Gas Sight camera is a single- pixel shortwave infrared camera operating between 1-2μm


University of Birmingham on a project to build a small satellite payload capable of producing cold atoms in space. Robertson explained that the project involves shrinking the laboratory setup into a package 10 x 20 x 2cm. Gooch & Housego is supplying a 780nm rubidium source; Robertson quoted the project as being worth £700,000. Bosch has a project engineering colour centres in diamond into a small device


@electrooptics | www.electrooptics.com


Sponsored by


The Photonics West 2018 fair, which took place from 27 January to 1 February in San Francisco, welcomed a record 23,000 attendees, who came to see photonics advances from 1,300 exhibitors and 5,000 technical presentations. Electro Optics was at the event


QuantIC/Kevin Mitchell


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