Challenge director for Quantum Technologies at UKRI, talks about the Industrial Strategy Challenge fund.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is a new body which works in partnership with universities, research organisations, businesses, charities, and government to create the best possible environment for research and innovation to flourish. They aim to maximise the contribution of each of their component parts, working individually and collectively.
Operating across the whole of the UK with a combined budget of more than £7bn, UKRI brings together the seven Research Councils, Innovate UK and Research England. Their mission is to be a trusted partner and to ensure research and innovation continues to flourish in the UK.
This includes supporting and helping connect the best researchers and innovators with customers, users and the public. UKRI claim that they ‘will invest every pound of taxpayers’ money wisely in a way that maximises impact for citizens, in the UK and across the world’.
SciTech Europa Quarterly spoke with Roger McKinlay, challenge director for Quantum Technologies at UKRI. McKinlay is currently overseeing the £20m pioneer challenge for Quantum Technologies, which aims to engage researchers to translate quantum science into quantum engineering and engage manufacturers who can use this work to develop new quantum-enabled devices and products. These technologies could transform whole sectors of the economy, from automotive and telecommunications to healthcare, infrastructure and cyber security.
Can you explain Quantum Technologies at UK Research and Innovation? Can you expand on the new commercialising quantum technologies programme?
For five years now, we have been running a national quantum technology programme, and it’s got several parts. At the heart are four academic hubs: one on imaging, which is based in Glasgow and another is based in Birmingham, which is in quantum sensing, which includes for example the detection of gravity. The third hub is at York University and focuses on communications, and the fourth is in Oxford which is on computing.
Unlike most countries which have a quantum information science programme for example like the US, we are very broad with what we’re covering. I believe that we are the only country, attempting to cover sensing, communications, imaging and computing; not one of those hubs is working on just fundamental scientific research. This is because they’ve also got scientific research programmes going on, but when we talk about the national programme, we’re mainly talking about commercialising the technology. These four hubs are genuine hubs; they’ve got spokes and they’re working with approximately 26 other universities – we have academics being funded all over the UK. As well as this, they are also working with 100 companies. These hubs have highly successful because it’s not just built technology, its built relationships; we’ve got a good network of industry and academia.
Moreover, alongside this we funded a variety of other projects. For example, we funded centres for doctoral training, which provided a pipeline of PhD students with the suitable skills, and so some of those are coming well through the process. We were addressing other skills such as quantum system engineering programs. We included in the program funding a quantum metrology Institute at our National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. We also had some money from our defence research side, looking at – amongst other things – sensing.
As a result, when we added all of those programmes together, it amounted to a total of £400m over four years. We just announced is the continuation of that program, which was always the plan as we used to say it was a 10-year program but only funded for five of those years. We’ve actually now seen the first examples of funding coming through for the next phase of the program. The next phases is going to include £153m public money for programme for new activities (to be matched by over £200m from the private sector), very specific for industry. However, the current hub activities that have been running for the past five years will also continue. So, in very round figures we’re looking at a ten-year programme with £1bn of work funded by the public and private sectors.
What is the importance of this sort of research?
I think it all stems from an economic and commercial drive; China is spending more money than any of us really know, and the US is the next big spender. However, despite this UK is currently sitting around third place. There’s several ways of looking at this, but probably the biggest commercial driver is the fact that computing as we currently know it, is reaching its limits. The physics is coming to a limit as well and it’s really very fundamental – it’s down to how much energy and how long it takes to move an electron around to signal a one or a nought. The science behind the quantum is saying ‘what if we use some subatomic property which an electronic charge wasn’t but was some other states you could put atoms or ions into’, and those are the quantum states.
The advantage of using quantum states is potentially the speed at which you could do calculations. In addition to this, because of the nature of the way it would work, it’s been described as being as different from a conventional computer, as an abacus is to a conventional computer. It would enable us to run calculations to solve things which we currently cannot. These are the big intractable problems with quantum computing could fix, such as logistics. There’s a tremendous commercial drive to be able to master these quantum states.
However, the problem is that they are so sensitive. They are sensitive to factors such as gravity and temperature, electromagnetism. Things which are all around us. As a result, a lot of the science is giving way to the engineering of how precisely you shut out the environment and control the states. At the moment a lot of lab experiments are requiring devices to be cooled down to a few milli Kelvin. You’ll find experimenters in heavily shielded in basements where there’s a minimum vibration and the environment can be controlled. The challenge now is getting this technology, out of the lab and into the hands of people who could use it.
There’s a bonus. What is problem to the computing people is a business opportunity to those who want to sense the environment. Take gravity for example. The Oxford lab people are trying to desperately remove those effects whereas the Birmingham lab folk are using it to build gravity sensors. At the heart of this is material science. We’re trying to manipulate quantum states in the same way that scientists in the late 1940s were playing with electrons in making the first transistor.
What are some of the current trends in quantum technology, and what challenges and limitations does this create for quantum research and innovation?
The most important thing to realise about the UK approach, it’s absolutely aimed at getting an economic advantage by quantum technologies giving companies a commercial benefit. And this is where the £153m investment comes in. There are two sorts of companies who might benefit. There are technology companies that will be making the technology. In this category, for example, are companies making lasers to control quantum states.
There are technology users. Companies such as British Telecom who just love to use this technology to either generate new services or make their existing services cheaper and more productive. A telecoms company could use quantum to detect gravity for avoiding obstacles when laying cables; use quantum keys to secure data; and, use quantum computers to optimise a network.
It’s potentially a big productivity boost. But the technology needs to be made usable. Imagine a gravity sensor on a mechanical digger. A red light comes on meaning “don’t dig – there’s something down there”.
There is the potential for minimising the disruption of maintaining infrastructure or building smarter infrastructure, just from something as simple as being able to sense what is underground before you start digging.
Our projects are going to be led by companies who have to pull the technology out of universities into the market. There are challenges at every step: commercial, engineering and science.
Can you expand on the following comment: “Five years of investment in the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme has given the UK a technological lead which businesses are now ready to turn in to a significant commercial advantage”?
Our strength is in a healthy ecosystem where universities and companies who are working incredibly closely. When we started spending our industrialisation money in a previous phase a year ago, we put out a small call and it was three times oversubscribed. We were asking for company led consortia to respond. One winning consortium had 16 different organisations in it.
It’s really interesting that we’ve got a very mature set up. At this stage of technology development, you would expect, universities to be looking around for companies that might be interested. We’ve already got an incredibly close relationship between industry and the universities – it is simply the business benefit from having been more joined up for five years.
The other benefit is that this is underpinned by world class science and research. It is essential, Five years ago, we decided the most promising quantum computing technology out of several competing technologies was the ion traps. The University of Oxford is undoubtedly a leading authority in this computing technology. I don’t think there’s going to be just one source of technology in the future but it’s really important that you are world-leading in some areas of technology development. It’s an essential part of the mix. We want to attract talent from all over the world and glean the commercial benefits in the UK. We want global companies to choose the UK to base their quantum development and exploitation. We’re investing in technology and the jobs. We’ll get the reward in both revolutionary technology and high-quality jobs.
Look towards the future, what is next?
The interesting things about these technologies is that there is not just one application. They are transversal. Over the next five years we will see some applications mature and the technology reach the market. One area maturing fast is in communications. ‘Quantum key distribution’, which involves dispersing cryptographic keys in the form of quantum information, is a good example.
We’ve got two of projects in this area running at the moment. One is looking at key distribution over fibre optic networks – networks already carrying traffic. Another is using satellites to distribute quantum keys. One important quantum property here is very appealing. If you intercept this information and read it, you effectively destroy the information. Therefore, these are keys which you know no one else has looked at and there’s huge advantages in that.
The other project, which is getting close, is the development of some highly intelligent cameras which are capable of detecting a single photon which brings sensitivity that we’ve never known before. You can see round corners. Well you can’t bend light, but you can see light scattering from objects which are out of the line of sight. You certainly know that there is something there because you can detect it. If you think about autonomous cars or assisted cars in the future, it would be useful to know if there might be something in a gap between two cars at the side of a road. A pedestrian for example.
This is a whole new level of imaging. It has many applications. We’ve described it as seeing the invisible. It will benefit medical imaging, and the oil and gas industry. ‘Seeing’ gas clouds – methane for example.
We are being faced with a world where we will suddenly be able to see things and measure things we never could before. Where we’re trying to save energy, reduce the amount of CO2 being produced, optimise complex systems, route traffic in the most optimal positions, and optimise our comms networks work. Make things more efficient; draw less power. All of this is a combination of new sensors and new computing, and it’s going to give us incredible capabilities.
We might see some clever forms of computer come to market fairly soon which are called ‘quantum simulators’. They wouldn’t work like a classical computer, but they may be capable of modelling complex things and we’re looking at that in, for example, developing materials. Think of new materials for better batteries. If we’re able to model what’s happening inside a battery, rather than having to build a prototype every 18 months (which is very costly), we can significantly speed up development. Thus, our ability to mobile complex chemical processes, will go on to drug discovery and being able to model some organic processes as well. This type of computer will be an incredibly powerful tools for those carrying out research in these areas.
However, what I should make clear is that I’m speaking as an engineer. No one likes to overhype what’s happening. We’ve got very used to electronic having got incredibly small, but this need not be the sort of technology to appear on your phone. It just has to be usable. In the world of industrial and professional applications, to be able to speed up the construction of a new railway for example, being small means being small enough. Being able to fit in a Land Rover for example. It may not be in your pocket, but it can still make a huge difference in life. I think it’s really important that we say to people that it may be a while before consumer products begin to make use of this technology, but in terms of securing our data on the internet for example, or securing information in our banks, then we will see the impact. This is going to be something which creeps up on the population quite stealthily.
Source: scitecheuropa
