Forbes After Wandering Balloon, China and U.S. will usher in the battle of quantum technology
A week ago, China and the United States erupted in an ongoing "spy balloon" dispute.
China and the U.S. have different explanations for the incident: the Chinese side said it was only a civilian dirigible, used for meteorological and other scientific research; this time, it just mistakenly entered U.S. airspace due to westerly winds and other effects. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement that the balloon "attempted to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States".
After the outbreak of the "stray balloon" incident, "Forbes" (Forbes) pointed out that the new round of international competition will not be such a simple form, but will be the field of quantum technology battle of science and technology.
Quantum technology will pose a security risk
The Pentagon has been exploring new ways to wage war using quantum physics for years, whether it's developing more powerful computers, supporting global positioning systems, enhancing communications security or surveillance means to better detect underwater submarines and underground bunkers.
Forbes says these developments are urgent: China is also investing heavily in further improving these capabilities.
Take GPS, for example. In the event of an armed conflict between the United States and China, one of the primary targets for either side would be the other country's GPS. Imagine the chaos that would ensue on the ground and in the air without it.
Researchers are developing quantum-enhanced navigation systems that could keep ships and aircraft working in the event of a GPS outage and guide missiles more precisely to their targets. Part of that involves building more accurate atomic clocks, because at the heart of GPS is a timing system: it's used to calculate the time difference between satellites and ground receivers. Michael Haiduk, deputy director of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, said the technology will be ready within five years.
William Clark, a physicist and vice president of Inflection, said, "It will change the world in a pretty dramatic way, and it won't have to wait very long." In the technology race with China, the Pentagon has increased spending on research and development in a number of areas, including quantum science. Government agencies have $918 million for quantum R&D in fiscal year 2022, up from $449 million in 2019, with the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research being the largest funders. These technologies are also receiving increasing venture capital support: according to PitchBook, quantum startups in the U.S. raised $870 million in 2022: nearly double the amount raised in 2020.
Most of the experience is spent on developing quantum computers. While classical computing is based on bits of 1 or 0, quantum computing uses "quantum bits", subatomic particles that can be both |1⟩ and |0⟩ at the same time, or in between, due to the phenomenon of quantum superposition, which allows them to be used to quickly solve complex problems that cannot be solved by current machines.
Useful quantum computers may be a decade or more away, but some of the basic research in controlling individual atoms and photons is about to be used to build more accurate sensors, including those that track motion: such as accelerometers and gyroscopes, and instruments that detect small changes in gravitational and magnetic fields.
China's breakthrough in quantum magnetic measurements has fueled speculation that it may be able to deploy a network of airborne instruments to detect underwater submarines from miles away. While many experts remain skeptical, in the long run, quantum gravimeters and magnetometers will be able to more accurately map subsurface features such as oil and mineral deposits, water levels, tunnels, and more.
International commercial competition in quantum technology
1) Cyber Security
The threat of breakthroughs in quantum computing in other countries is already having an impact on cybersecurity.
U.S. national security insiders say China and other hostile nations are collecting encrypted U.S. communications and other sensitive data and storing it until the day when quantum computers are powerful enough to crack existing encryption systems.
Last year, the Biden administration and Congress took steps to transition government agencies to new "quantum-resistant" encryption methods - methods that are thought to be immune to quantum computers.
China is taking a different, more expensive approach to the threat of quantum cryptography being broken. Currently, China has developed a network of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables connecting major cities, passing random quantum keys through photons to ensure secure communications. Because of the nature of quantum mechanics, it is believed that any attempt to monitor such a network would alter the photons and draw the attention of users. China is also the first country to demonstrate quantum key distribution via satellite.
A RAND study last year concluded that with these efforts, China has surpassed the United States in quantum communications. While the U.S. leads in quantum computing, it is unclear exactly which of the two is superior in quantum sensing, the RAND Corporation wrote.
2) Achieve more accurate time and gravity measurements
The current generation of satellite GPS can only estimate positions to within three meters; quantum physics will allow it to exhibit much higher accuracy.
In the lab, scientists have developed more accurate, optical laser-based, room-sized atomic clocks that differ by only one second over billions of years. vector Atomic is one of the few companies working to develop smaller, more robust everyday watches, and is committed to trading cutting-edge laboratory performance for reliability and practicality.
During last summer's Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval exercise, Vector Atomic said it demonstrated the shipboard optical clock. This improvement can have many benefits. By reducing the frequency of updates to satellite clocks from the ground, GPS will maintain high accuracy. Pairing with low-Earth orbit satellites will bring GPS signals closer together, and this more precise timing will improve accuracy to within centimeters. This would mean, for example, that GPS could keep driverless cars in their lanes.
Three optical atomic clocks
Better timing will also allow more efficient use of cellular and other wireless networks, bringing more users into what is currently considered a highly congested spectrum.
The portable atomic clocks could be mounted on aircraft or ground vehicles. Jamil Abo-Shair, CEO of Vector Atomic, which manages DARPA's Quantum program, said this would allow the U.S. military to create temporary local GPS networks around the battlefield, whose communication signals would be so strong they would be difficult to disrupt.
Atomic gravimeter for maritime navigation
Also at RIMPAC, Vector Atomic demonstrated a compact quantum gravimeter paired with a standard inertial navigation system that promises to enable Navy ships to navigate without GPS. The device measures small changes in the strength of local gravity caused by changes in the terrain beneath the ocean, Abo-Shaeer said, adding that by comparing the measurements to a gravity map, the device can correct for errors in a ship's inertial navigation system and accurately fix the ship's position.
Within two to three years, the company said, it will begin commercializing an energy-efficient version small enough to fit in the trunk of a car.
Several other companies are also working on quantum inertial sensors, including Australia's Q-CTRL: The company and partner Advanced Navigation plan to conduct a field demonstration of a quantum navigation system in mid-2023. Colorado-based Inflection is also developing a quantum positioning system for personal vehicles project plans to build a quantum gyroscope that will be flight tested in 2024.
3) Quantum communication devices
Infleqtion, which changed its name from ColdQuanta last year with funding from DARPA, is also developing a quantum radio receiver to replace satellite antennas. They can tune the entire spectrum from the HF and UHF bands used by military tactical radios to the K-band used by SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband network. the technology allows one device to replace ten different receivers today, Clark said.
By 2025, the company plans to demonstrate a pocket-sized six-band receiver with a laser and back-end electronics that can shrink to the size of a small shoebox.
In addition, Clark said, similar technology could be used to build tunable multi-band transmitters. "That would be a holy grail, and it would be like the Star Trek communicator, complete communications and more in a tiny device."
4) More international competition ......
The RAND researchers point out that the Soviet Union had some of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century, but there is little indication that Russia is developing significant quantum technology today. China's work in quantum technology is focused on large national laboratories: it may be at a disadvantage in commercializing quantum sensors compared to the United States, which has a range of private companies.
"The real progress in quantum sensing is no longer necessarily laboratory work or academic work, but bringing it to practical applications; it's not clear to me that there's a private sector doing the nitty-gritty work."
Reference link：
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2023/02/13/the-spy-balloon-is-just-the-start-venture-capital-joins-pentagon-in-spending-big-to-thwart-china-in-quantum-tech-war/?sh=7b389d6e3db6
