Home > Publications database > Quantum Technology - Lecture Notes of the 51st IFF Spring School 2020 |
Book/Proceedings | FZJ-2020-03256 |
; ;
2020
Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH Zentralbibliothek, Verlag
Jülich
ISBN: 978-3-95806-449-2
Please use a persistent id in citations: http://hdl.handle.net/2128/25977
Abstract: This is the first time in the 51-year history of the IFF Spring School that the subject has been a “Technology”. Can there be two weeks of intensive lectures by top scientists on a mere technology? The decision just a few years ago, to designate $\textbf{Quantum Technology}$ as a coherent societal endeavour, was taken after much deliberation within a large circle of working scientists. This endeavour is not a technology in a traditional sense, but is rather a unique intermingling of basic scientific insights, new capabilities demonstrated in laboratories, and an ambition to turn these unique capabilities into applications for the further advancement of technical capability on a number of fronts. The “quantum revolution” has been declared multiple times over the last century. The first uncovering of quantum mechanics at the beginning of the 20$^{th}$ century was an intellectual revolution, albeit a small one confined to the circle of modern physicists. But by mid-century, quantum knowledge was power: first with the quantum properties of the nucleus, but much more extensively with the quantum behaviour of light and of electrons, entirely new capabilities arose. This first (quantum) technological revolution produced the information processing world of today. But our second quantum revolution, which has prompted the birth of our new quantumtechnology era, was waiting to happen because only a subset of the phenomena that are possible in the quantum world were harnessed in the first edition. We have simple, if inscrutable, names for some of these phenomena – “quantum entanglement”, “spooky action at a distance”, “quantum logic gates”. But it takes more than a glance to perceive what are the new things that are happening that produce our new quantum-technological era. One helpful guide has been provided, and will be followed in the lecture scheme of our two weeks together. We speak of quantum technology as consisting of four pillars, which define the new application areas that are foreseen as a result of the fuller exploitation of the phenomenology of the quantum world: $\textbf{Quantum Sensing and Metrology}$: Quantum mechanics defines the smallest detectable influence; here the aim is to produce detection devices working at this limit. $\textbf{Quantum Communication}$: We can work towards networks that communicate not bits, but two-level quantum systems (qubits); these can yield absolute advantages in the security, privacy, and authenticatability of transmissions, and are important for interconnecting quantum computers: $\textbf{Quantum Computing}$: If bits are replaced by qubits in processors, a new style of computing machine can come into being. For some problems it will have unrivalled algorithmic power. $\textbf{Quantum Simulation}$: When appropriately specialized, quantum processors can efficiently mimic the dynamics of natural objects obeying the laws of quantum mechanics. The quantum simulator can sharpen our modelling abilities for complex molecular or solid-state quantum systems. [...]
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