A6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, AUGUST 19 , 2019
ies, governments and businesses
that handle sensitive data.
To get a fully functioning com-
puter — a goal still a decade or
more away, most scientists agree
— researchers must coax a large
number of qubits into working
together efficiently. That’s diffi-
cult because qubits are finicky
and have the propensity to stop
functioning at the slightest dis-
turbance, such as a minor change
in temperature.
Google and IBM are at the
forefront, using superconducting
circuits to manipulate qubits.
Google last year unveiled a quan-
tum processor with 72 qubits,
surpassing IBM’s previously an-
nounced 50-qubit computer.
More important than the num-
ber of qubits is how effectively
they work together, said Chris
Monroe, a University of Maryland
physicist and co-founder of the
start-up IonQ. The company re-
cently reported that its prototype
computer, using 11 qubits made of
ionized atoms, performed more
complex calculations with great-
er accuracy than any rival ma-
chine. (IonQ’s investors include
AWS, a subsidiary of Amazon,
whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns
The Washington Post).
Chinese researchers so far have
reported a 12-qubit processor, us-
ing superconducting technology
similar to Google’s and IBM’s.
The leader of that work, USTC
professor Zhu Xiaobo, presented
his team’s results at the Shanghai
conference, flashing a picture of
their prototype on the screen — a
shiny tangle of coaxial cables re-
sembling an intricate golden
chandelier. (IBM’s and Google’s
machines have a similar look.)
“We are now working on 24
qubits,” Zhu said. “We hope next
year we will go to 50, and maybe
sometime we will go to quantum
supremacy,” he added, referring
to the point at which a quantum
computer is able to perform a
calculation that existing comput-
ers can’t. The benchmark, though
widely anticipated, will mark
only the beginning of progress in
the field, scientists say.
Lu Chaoyang, a young physi-
cist who earned his PhD at Cam-
bridge University, also stepped to
the lectern to deliver an update on
his team’s approach to quantum
computing. It relies on photons,
which he dubbed “fast-flying
qubits.”
Lu, whom Sanders calls a “ris-
ing superstar” in China, peppered
his talk with funny cat GIFs and
Western cultural references.
Although the idea for a quan-
tum computer first surfaced 40
years ago, there is still a long way
to go, Lu said.
He then pressed play on a brief
video snippet of “Harry Potter”
author J.K. Rowling, who spoke
about the importance of setting
“achievable goals.”
“It’s important we set achiev-
able goals for experiments so we
can continuously progress,” Lu
said.
[email protected]Lyric Li contributed to this report.United States.”
Asked whether his group con-
tributes to research for the Chi-
nese military, Pan said his univer-
sity and team are “by nature, for
fundamental scientific research
and education.”
“We publish our fundamental
research results in international
journals which are available to
read from all around the world.
From reading our papers, other
people, who can be from the Unit-
ed States, Europe, Japan, or Chi-
na, might be inspired and further
develop ‘immediately useful’
technology or products for indus-
try or commercial or military
use,” he said, adding this was “out
of our control.”
Some corners of the U.S. gov-
ernment are restricting collabo-
ration with China. In June, the
Energy Department, one of the
main agencies funding physics
and quantum-science research,
prohibited its employees and con-
tractors from responding to cer-
tain foreign countries’ talent-re-
cruitment programs, including
China’s Thousand Talents. The
agency said it wanted to limit
“unauthorized transfers of scien-
tific and technical information.”
The ban followed the indict-
ment of a former scientist at the
Energy Department’s Los Alamos
National Laboratory, on charges
of making false statements about
his involvement with Thousand
Talents.
“What we have said in short-
hand is, you cannot work for the
Department of Energy and for
one of these foreign talent recruit-
ment programs. You cannot work
for a foreign country and the
Department of Energy at the
same time,” Chris Fall, director of
the agency’s Office of Science,
said in an interview.
In part motivated by China’s
progress, Congress late last year
passed the National Quantum
Initiative Act, which authorized
an extra $1.2 billion in research
funding over five years. The En-
ergy Department is on tap to
receive a big chunk of that money,
which it plans to use to set up
several quantum-focused re-
search centers. The agency is so-
liciting ideas from its own nation-
al laboratories and from univer-
sities and the private sector as it
decides how to establish those
centers, Fall said.
“The beauty of how we do sci-
ence in this country is that it isn’t
top-down,” he said.
For now, China is lagging be-
hind the U.S. tech industry in
perhaps the most important race
in the field: building a quantum
computer.
A fully functioning quantum
computer has the potential to be
transformative. The exponential-
ly greater calculation power
could help identify new chemical
compounds to treat intractable
diseases, and eliminate traffic
snarls by predicting and manag-
ing the flow of vehicles.
However, the possibility that
the machines could eventually
crack all existing forms of encryp-
tion is a major worry for militar-ment about how we are training
all these people, and a lot of them
are going back to China and com-
peting in technologies that have
implications for national security.
And we’re talking about what to
do about it.
“Many of us in academia, al-
though we know there are com-
plicated issues, are inclined to
continue encouraging Chinese
students to come,” Preskill said,
“but there is a continuing discus-
sion in the government about
what’s the best policy for doing
that.”
In an opinion piece this month,
two U.S. university associations
said their members were
strengthening security protocols
and building closer relationships
with the FBI and intelligence
agencies, after hearing “increas-
ing concern” from the federal gov-
ernment about “foreign interfer-
ence” in university research. They
also praised the contributions of
Chinese students and faculty and
said the United States must con-
tinue to welcome them.
Pan said he believed collabora-
tion would bring only rewards in
quantum science.
“The academic exchange ben-
efits both countries,” he said via
email. “I see no reason whatso-
ever that the United States gov-
ernment should be concerned
and discourage normal academic
activities. Recall that quantum
mechanics was first developed in
Europe, and then moved to thesomeday be able to crack all exist-
ing forms of encryption. Quan-
tum sensors could help the Chi-
nese military track and target
enemy troops with greater preci-
sion. The university where Pan
works, USTC, has established sev-
eral quantum-research partner-
ships with state-owned defense
companies in recent years, with
aims that include enhancing the
combat capability of naval ves-
sels, according to Chinese media
reports cited in the Center for a
New American Security paper.
“China’s national advances in
quantum communications and
computing ... will be leveraged to
support military purposes,” ac-
cording to the paper’s authors,
Elsa Kania and John Costello,
who reviewed hundreds of Chi-
nese-language media, govern-
ment and technical reports.
Scientists who have discussed
the field with U.S. government
officials say the Trump adminis-
tration has recently expressed
concern about the number of Chi-
nese students pursuing studies in
the United States in sensitive ar-
eas such as quantum science.
“We’ve always encouraged the
best and brightest to come from
overseas, and it’s always served
our nation well,” said John
Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman
Professor of Theoretical Physics
at the California Institute of Tech-
nology, who has advised the gov-
ernment on quantum-tech issues.
“But there is concern in govern-strong position to sell it, given the
large number of patents its uni-
versities and companies have reg-
istered for devices and technol-
ogy relating to quantum commu-
nication and encryption, accord-
ing to Patinformatics.
Pan has credited Edward
Snowden for motivating China’s
quantum research. The former
National Security Agency con-
tractor’s revelations about NSA
eavesdropping led China to pour
money into developing more se-
cure communications, Pan has
said in published interviews.
Barry Sanders, a Canadian
physicist from the University of
Calgary, spends two to three
months a year as a visiting profes-
sor at the USTC labs in Shanghai.
He got the job through China’s
“Thousand Talents” program,
which recruits Western scientists
for teaching and research stints,
and offers incentives to persuade
Chinese researchers to return
home from overseas.
Sanders said China’s cultural
differences can provide advantag-
es in the lab.
“I have my Western way of
doing things — freedom of
thought, take risks,” he said. In
China, there is more emphasis on
the common good, he said. “One
guy spent two years really focused
on how to prepare the lab room.
You can assign people these tasks
— they will do something that in
our world would be seen as be-
neath us. But here they are sup-
ported and held in high esteem.”
Pan received his doctorate
from the University of Vienna in
1999 and conducted further re-
search at the University of Heidel-
berg before moving home, along
with several Chinese colleagues.
China’s work on quantum tech-
nologies at the time was “relative-
ly backward” and needed outside
help, Pan said in an email. “There-
fore, our team took the initiative
to send students to top research
groups abroad to learn related
technologies,” he said. “Fortu-
nately, they later returned back to
work in China.”
Most of the Chinese research-
ers speaking at the Shanghai con-
ference spent years studying
overseas. Their slide decks were
peppered with humorous refer-
ences to Western pop culture and
events. One featured a picture of
President Trump with the caption
“Make SPDC Great Again” — a
reference to an optical process
whereby a photon splits in two.
During a coffee break, one Chi-
nese researcher’s phone erupted
in a ringtone from the TV show
“Friends.”
Their PhDs or postdoctoral cre-
dentials came from universities
such as Stanford, the Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge and the University of
Toronto, according to their biog-
raphies printed in the program.
While their talks didn’t focus
on military applications, much of
the technology they’re pursuing
would have clear uses in both the
commercial and defense realms,
scientists say.
Quantum computers mightwith Western research in the field
and, in a few areas, pull ahead.
Beijing is pouring billions into
research and development and is
offering Chinese scientists big
perks to return home from West-
ern labs. China’s drive has
sparked calls for more R&D fund-
ing in the United States, and
helped trigger concerns in the
Trump administration that some
types of scientific collaboration
with China may be aiding the
People’s Liberation Army and
hurting U.S. interests.
“The United States must be
prepared for a future in which its
traditional technological pre-
dominance faces new, perhaps
unprecedented challenges,” the
Center for a New American Secu-
rity wrote in a recent report about
China’s quantum ambitions.
Quantum technology seeks to
harness the distinct properties of
atoms, photons and electrons to
build more powerful tools for pro-
cessing information.
Last year, China had nearly
twice as many patent filings as the
United States for quantum tech-
nology overall, a category that
includes communications and
cryptology devices, according to
market research firm Patinfor-
matics. The United States,
though, leads the world in patents
relating to the most prized seg-
ment of the field — quantum
computers — thanks to heavy in-
vestment by IBM, Google, Micro-
soft and others.
Helping oversee China’s pro-
gram is Pan, whom Chinese me-
dia call the “father of quantum.”
From his labs at the University of
Science and Technology of China
(USTC), in Shanghai and Hefei,
the 49-year-old leads a team of
130 researchers. In 2017, the jour-
nal Nature named him one of “ten
people who mattered this year,”
saying he had “lit a fire under the
country’s efforts in quantum
technology.”
Pan occasionally gives lab tours
to President Xi Jinping, who takes
a keen interest in his work, ac-
cording to Chinese media. Pan is
also overseeing plans for a new
national lab for quantum re-
search in Anhui province, which
he said had drawn about
$400 million in government
funding.
At the Shanghai event, Pan il-
lustrated his slide presentation
with science-nerd jokes about
Einstein and “Star Trek.” In a nod
to Schrödinger’s cat — a 1930s
thought experiment that helped
define a quantum concept called
superposition — Pan used images
of a cartoon feline standing up-
right and lying flat on its back.
“As we all know, in our every-
day life, a cat can only either be in
an alive or dead state,” Pan said,
but “a cat in the quantum world
can be in a coherent superposi-
tion of alive and dead states.”
He was making the point that
quantum particles, also known as
quantum bits, differ fundamen-
tally from the bits in today’s tech-
nology. Existing computers and
communications networks store,
process and transmit information
by breaking it down into long
streams of bits, which are typical-
ly electrical or optical pulses rep-
resenting a zero or one.
Quantum bits, or qubits, which
are often atoms, electrons or pho-
tons, can exist as zeros and ones at
the same time, or in any position
between, a flexibility that allows
them to process information in
new ways. Some physicists com-
pare them to a spinning coin that
is simultaneously in a heads and
tails state.
In his talk, Pan detailed how
China is harnessing qubits to
safeguard its communications
from hacking — one of the fields
in which China appears to have a
lead over the West.
Pan and his team are aiming to
launch a constellation of satellites
and a nationwide fiber-optic net-
work that use qubits to securely
transmit information. An almost
1,300-mile fiber link connecting
Beijing, Shanghai and other cities
is already up and running. So is a
satellite China launched in 2016,
which has conducted several
prominent experiments, includ-
ing facilitating a hacking-resis-
tant video conference between
Beijing and Vienna.
When the network is complete,
it could complicate U.S. efforts to
eavesdrop on China’s government
or military communications,
some Western scientists say.
“I predict China will go black in
two to three years — we won’t be
able to read anything,” said Jona-
than Dowling, a physics professor
at Louisiana State University who
spends part of the year as a visit-
ing faculty member at USTC in
Shanghai.
Others argue that even if Chi-
na’s network equipment is more
secure, it could still be hacked by
manipulating the humans run-
ning the system.
If the technology gains traction
globally, China could be in a
TECHNOLOGY FROM A
At heart of quantum rivalry: Economic, security concerns
Patent filings for quantum technology by country
The United States used to produce more patents for quantum technology
than China, but in the past decade China has leaped ahead.0200400 patents1983 20182484923045
31U.S.ChinaJapanS. Korea
E.U.IBM RESEARCH
IBM scientists examine the inner workings of a quantum computer.
The gold-colored cables resembling a chandelier are a common
feature of quantum computers that use superconducting circuits.DANIEL HERTZBERG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Chinese quantum technology patents have soared, but the United States has a lead in quantum computing. Find out more about quantum tech at wapo.st/quantum.