TECHNICALLY SPEAKING
That sound you hear is the tick- tock of a super- accurate quantum clock, counting down the time until quantum information science enables a leap forward in cybersecurity, navigation, code breaking and all kinds of other puzzles.
by Dr. Kimberly Sablon, Dr. Peter J. Reynolds, Dr. Fredrik Fatemi and Dr. Sara Gamble
T
here are strange phenomena that cannot be explained by the laws of classical physics, unusual enough that they disturbed Einstein. Tis discovery stemmed from observations in the early 20th century on the nature of light and heat, and gave birth to the field of quantum
mechanics, required to describe the behavior of atoms, photons and subatomic particles, as well as the universe as a whole. “Quantum” refers to the fundamental discreteness of nature—that at the smallest scales, measurements of energy, of light, of matter, and so on, come in indivisible packets.
Quantum mechanics revolutionized physics and continues to revolutionize science and technology today. Early research led to numerous technologies including lasers, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), transistors and microprocessors. Tese advances leveraged certain properties of quantum mechanics but did not take advantage of all the odd phenomena that quantum mechanics embodies—such as that light is both wave and particle (matter-wave duality), and that a given elec- tron, for example, can be two things at once until observation freezes it in one state (superposition).
In the 1970s, physicists merged quantum properties with information science, and by the 1990s it was clear that the marriage of these fields into quantum informa- tion science may have sweeping impacts, not only on defense applications, but also on the day-to-day lives of nearly everyone on the planet.
Te tipping point for an appreciation of the importance of quantum information science came courtesy of mathematician Peter Shor. He developed an algorithm that leveraged quantum properties to factor very large numbers efficiently. While this may seem only like a mathematical curiosity, the importance of this algorithm cannot be overstated because the difficulty of the factoring problem is at the root of the encryption—known as the RSA cryptosystem—that encodes nearly every elec- tronic transaction underlying secure government communications, emails, bank
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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