A Brief Overview of Quantum Computing in the US
Introduction
Overall, the US is one of the leading players in research, investment and the private sector in quantum technology globally. Going back a few decades, the US was the dominant player until China made headway, starting in the 2010s. With a handful of research institutes, multiple universities, and a healthy number of companies and startups, this is only going to continue.
The Quantum Insider should warn you, however, as the title says, this is a “short” an outline of the quantum technology industry in the US, and we’ve only covered a small part of what’s really going on. If we miss someone or anything, please don’t take it personally – we’re only human after all.
Government Position
The US government has made a number of strategic investments in quantum computing (QC) research and development through various initiatives, the most important of which recently is The National Quantum Initiative Act, signed into law in 2018 by President Donald Trump and coordinated by the Office of National Quantum Coordination. The act provides the United States with a plan to advance quantum technology, particularly quantum computing and offers general support to government agencies developing programs related to quantum science and technology in that country.
Prior to that, however, the US government was the first to convene a workshop on quantum computing hosted by NIST in 1994. Two years later, it issued its first public call for research proposals in quantum information processing in partnership with the Army Research. Laboratory.
Research
Government investment in QC research aims to advance these technologies to solve some of the most challenging problems in science, engineering and national security. Current research is aimed at applying quantum computing technologies to improve outcomes in drug discovery and cryptography, as well as financial and climate modeling.
A report by The Quantum Insider published in January this year, stated that as part of its commitment to accelerate US leadership on QIS, the Biden-Harris Administration has emphasized a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach while mitigating potential risks. In addition, with budget spending on QIS R&D increasing from $449 million in 2019 to $918 million in 2022, and an authorized budget requested of $844 million for 2023, the United States has made substantial and ongoing investments in QIS R&D.
The government has also set up several national laboratories whose sole focus is targeted at quantum computing research. These include the Argonne National Laboratory, whose CELS Directorate is conducting research in quantum information science covering theory, algorithms, simulation, and modeling of quantum systems, and the Brookhaven National Laboratory, which provides cross-disciplinary strategies for leveraging quantum effects in physics for advanced computing. , communications, and basic sciences and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, busy researching the theory to applications for quantum technology.
Many private institutions are also researching QC, some of the best include MIT, Caltech, Harvard, and Stanford.
Private sector
This is where the US really dominates, with some of the leading quantum computing companies, many of them leading companies from the classical computing industry. Examples include IBM and its research and production of commercial quantum computers based on superconducting circuits. Google comes to mind and the 53-qubit superconducting Sycamore quantum processor, which is made by Google’s Artificial Intelligence division. Microsoft is another major player in the market, featuring solutions, software, and hardware delivered via Azure.
Independent — and there are many — startup players include IonQ, a publicly traded spinoff from the University of Maryland and Duke University. The company is developing ion trapping quantum computer and software to generate, optimize and run quantum circuits. Another thing to note is Quantum Computing Inc. The Leesburg, Virginia-based company delivers a suite of full-stack quantum solutions that include the Entropy Quantum Computer (EQC), which is designed to exclude noise in systems and create useful qubits for performing computations and software that offers Qatalyst, a cloud-based service that solves various types of optimization problems on various quantum computers or quantum simulators which are also public companies.
Key Person
While it is almost impossible to name the most important people currently involved in quantum technology in this country because the list is so long, two that stand out are John Martinis And John Preskill.
Martini’s influence spans academia and the commercial sector. A professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, In 2014 he joined the Google Quantum AI Lab to build a quantum computer using superconducting qubits, though he resigned from Google in 2020 and moved to Australia to join Silicon Quantum Computing, a startup founded by Professor Michelle Simmons, in which she is involved until 2021.
2019 was an important year academically for Martinis, as he and his team published a paper in Nature, Quantum supremacy uses programmable superconducting processorsin which they presented how they achieved quantum supremacy (hereby disproving the extended Church-Turing thesis) for the first time using a 53-qubit quantum computer.
Another important figure is John Preskill, American theoretical physicist and Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he is also Director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter.
Preskill is known to have coined not one but two terms that are common parlance in today’s quantum computing circles, “quantum supremacy” back in 2012 and “noisy mid-scale quantum” (NISQ) in
Conclusion
It is guaranteed the US will be the leader this decade and beyond in quantum technology, driven by significant government investment in research and a thriving private ecosystem.
Quantum Intelligence Platform
This is just a basic overview of what’s happening in the US in the quantum technology industry. Want to find out more about the US quantum ecosystem? For a more in-depth look at the market, check out Quantum Insider’s own Quantum Intelligence Platform, a leading provider of Quantum Computing market data, reports, analytics, and insights on QC companies, investors, funding, and more.
Based on our proprietary taxonomy and customizable metadata, this platform enables you to find robust funding commercial information that can be filtered by subsector and technology type while seamlessly integrating into The Quantum Insider’s database of news and information about the Quantum Computing industry.
But that’s not all, we recently added our Data Graph Explorer, a tool that allows those interested to see the interesting relationships and connections in the quantum market and make decisions based on those relationships.
