U.S. vs. Them, a Complicated Quantum Entanglement
A recent demonstration of quantum teleportation over busy internet cables proved the United States’ continued commitment to quantum research and advancement. The question, however, remains: Is any progress pivotal enough to compete with adversarial threats?
The research study titled Quantum Teleportation Coexisting with Classical Communications in Optical Fiber was a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and conducted by Northwestern University’s Prem Kumar, along with a group of six graduate students.
“Previously, people thought that one would need to build a separate infrastructure because most of these quantum effects—whether it’s teleportation or entanglement swapping or quantum communications in general—[rely] on very weak signals,” Kumar told SIGNAL Media in an interview.
The construction of separate infrastructure is extremely costly, he explained, which is why the ability to adopt quantum technologies into today’s realistic applications is so crucial. “Here, the key thing is that it can coexist with standard communications,” Kumar explained.
While the three-year-long research has provided groundbreaking findings, the technology is still very nascent, thus leaving room for obstacles. “Teleportation requires a new type of resource, the resource of entanglement, and generating photons that are entangled in an efficient way is still very challenging,” the professor explained.
Tools of the trade such as nonlinear optical effects and web-guides lack in availability, Kumar said, underlining supply chain issues. “The engineering of sourcing those is still a challenge, because only a few vendors supply these things and oftentimes if they break, there’s a long lead time.” If the technology advances enough to be commercially available, however, some of the current obstacles could be overcome.
Yet the challenges of quantum technology go beyond maturity and current capability. So stated John Burke, principal director for quantum science for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering for Science and Technology. “There are fundamental constraints that quantum mechanics create on what you can literally do with these quantum systems,” he told SIGNAL Media.
Northwestern University’s research is important as it helps break down existing constraints, Burke stated. “Going forward, we’re really hoping that more academics take a mindset of exploring how quantum works at laboratory scales and what constraints it falls under and to explore new application concepts, because it’s really limited by that,” he continued.
Several institutions, Burke said, look to get ahead of science by building new and expensive infrastructure to realize quantum networking. “[Kumar] and his team have shown that you don’t need to do that.”
“I do worry that there’s a tension here between people with the excitement of quantum technologies but skipping over the rigorous analysis and jumping straight to building something that sounds good in the news,” Burke shared.
Still, the United States has the best ecosystem for quantum advancement and the greatest advantage going forward, according to Burke. For example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Quantum Benchmarking initiative looks at areas of uncertainty within quantum computers. Similarly, Burke’s team is working with the Armed Services to stand up a program to study DoD’s utilization of near-term quantum computing.
This type of advancement is largely due to the forward-thinking approach taken by the Department of Defense (DoD) 30 years ago when this was still fundamental research.
“We saw the value in it and invested in that early on,” Burke said. “If you go look at the big companies that make headlines in quantum computing these days, the leaders were investigators under DoD programs going back to around the turn of the Millennium.”
There is still room for growth, however. “We do have the risk of not investing in the technology enough now that it’s coming to fruition … we need to be mindful and strategic and actually realizing the advantages of the technology of the science that we generated from decades past and that I do worry about, because our funding profile in the United States is much more aimed at fundamental research than it is at technology development, at least in this field,” Burke told SIGNAL Media. Failing to take advantage of existing discoveries could create advantageous potential for adversarial nations, he stated.
On the world stage, international competition regarding quantum technology must be observed on a case-by-case basis, said Antonia Hmaidi, senior analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, Europe’s largest think tank devoted to research and analysis of contemporary China.
While the United States is ahead in quantum computing, the People’s Republic of China is ahead in quantum communications. “We’re still waiting for a breakthrough,” Hmaidi told SIGNAL Media, stating that the chances of quantum breakthroughs coming from the Western ecosystem are much higher.
“China has the largest quantum network in deployment. I would call it experimental deployment at this point. We have not heard anything about actual uses as the only or main network for anyone,” she said, adding that no significant breakthroughs are currently expected in that realm.
Hmaidi additionally noted China’s ownership of the only two quantum satellites in the world. If western nations funded research more rapidly, today’s landscape could look different. “Before the first Chinese quantum satellite, European and U.S. scientists had been trying to get the European Space Agency and NASA to fund a quantum satellite for 10 years,” she noted. Echoing Burke’s statements, Hmaidi pointed at western states not investing at a rapid enough pace to stay ahead of competition. “You need to be willing to really create waste to make that possible,” she continued. While the United States and Europe focus on efficiency, which Hmaidi said can be positive, being open to failure can lead to higher chances of breakthroughs.
“This is probably a case that is more traumatic for Europeans in some cases because Pan Jianwei, who is the head of China’s quantum [research] was actually educated in Europe,” Hmaidi shared. Now a Chinese academic administrator and quantum physicist, Jianwei, along with his research group, had tried to get European funding for a quantum satellite. The rejection, Hmaidi said, led him back to China, where he was able to launch his project.
The instance highlights procurement challenges and a lack of regulatory upkeep. “China is willing to use procurement strategically in a way of making sure that its companies don’t go under even if there’s no private demand yet,” Hmaidi said. DARPA follows a similar model, she pointed out. “It’s a question of regulation fit for a purpose, and this is a big problem that we are running into where China sometimes has an easier time because some things they started later so they could skip some phases,” Hmaidi explained.
Quantum AI researcher Theresa Melvin agreed that China’s government structure puts it at an advantage for technological progression. “Communication-wise, their list of achievements is so many in the past two months alone,” Melvin told SIGNAL Media.
Just last October, Melvin stated, China laid claim to breaking Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) encryption using a quantum annealer. Of note, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is strongly encouraging enterprises to roll out quantum keys by 2030.
One of the difficulties in quantum advancement within the United States lies in lack of focus on pure quantum mechanical research, Melvin explained. “Quantum networking is in its infancy ... in fact, it almost doesn’t exist, because in order to build quantum networks, that is pure quantum mechanical research, there is almost nobody doing pure quantum mechanical research,” she said. “It’s a very difficult field because there’s no classical components to it and that is really hard.”
As with any complex innovation, the lack of awareness and knowledge of quantum technology poses an obstacle to its advancement. Dimitri Zabelin, founder and geopolitical strategist at Pantheon Insights spoke on this during an interview with SIGNAL Media. “Quantum computing, while it is an emerging topic, is relatively niche,” he stated. “It is a highly frontier technology, to the point where it begins to bridge on fantasy and philosophy.”
News of quantum enhancement or its effects on geopolitical decisions often flies under the radar. “A lot of people don’t know that the Biden administration in 2021, 2022 and 2023 imposed multiple rounds of export controls on quantum computing-related hardware to China,” Zabelin said.
One of the reasons for that, he explained, was a white paper published by China’s People’s Liberation Army focused on their new mode of economic warfare. The document, titled Systems Confrontation, explores the idea of multidimensional warfare. Zabelin broke down that rather than trying to best an opponent in one dimension—land, air, sea, space, cyber—China’s take on multidimensional warfare is about “optimizing the domination of a single critical point within a system to disrupt the adversary’s overall capability.” The strategy, he said, is about leveraging strengths asymmetrically, and exploiting asymmetry in the enemy’s weaknesses.
“If it sounds really ‘meta’ and out there, it’s because it is,” he continued. “If you have, for instance, coordination between land, air, space and sea ... that’s a lot of variables to incorporate all at once, and a lot of potential outcomes. And what could help solve that? A quantum computer working in tandem with complementary AI software.”
