A quantum computer isn’t just a more powerful version of the computers we use today; it’s something else entirely, based on emerging scientific understanding — and more than a bit of uncertainty. Enter the quantum wonderland with TED Fellow Shohini Ghose and learn how this technology holds the potential to transform medicine, create unbreakable encryption and even teleport information.
Within days of each other back in 1998, two teams published the results of the first real-world quantum computations. But the first quantum computers weren’t computers at all. They were biochemistry equipment, relying on the same science as MRI machines.
You might think of quantum computing as a hyped-up race between computer companies to build a powerful processing device that will make more lifelike AI, revolutionize medicine, and crack the encryption that protects our data. And indeed, the prototype quantum computers of the late 1990s indirectly led to the quantum computers built by Google and IBM. But that’s not how it all began—it started with physicists tinkering with mathematics and biochemistry equipment for curiosity’s sake.
Quantum computing will break most of the encryption schemes on which we rely today. These five tips will help you get ready.
Search on the phrase “quantum computing,” and you’ll find a furious debate. On the one hand, you’ll read breathless articles predicting groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence, genomics, economics, and pretty much every field under the sun. On the other, you’ll find the naysayers: It’s all hype. Large-scale quantum computers are still decades away — if they’re possible at all. Even if they arrive, they won’t be much faster than standard computers except for a tiny subset of problems.
There’s one area, however, where you’ll find all sides agree: Quantum computing will break most of the encryption schemes on which we rely today. If you’re responsible for your organization’s IT or security systems, and that sentence made the hair on the back of your neck stand up, good. To get ready for a post-quantum world, you should be thinking about the problem now.
Holography is a powerful tool that can reconstruct wavefronts of light and combine the fundamental wave properties of amplitude, phase, polarization, wave vector and frequency. Smart multiplexing techniques (multiple signal integration) together with metasurface designs are currently in high demand to explore the capacity to engineer information storage systems and enhance optical encryption security using such metasurface holograms.
Holography based on metasurfaces is a promising candidate for applications in optical displays/storage with enormous information bearing capacity alongside a large field of view compared to traditional methods. To practically realize metasurface holograms, holographic profiles should be encoded on ultrathin nanostructures that possess strong light-matter interactions (plasmonic interactions) in an ultrashort distance. Metasurfaces can control light and acoustic waves in a manner not seen in nature to provide a flexible and compact platform and realize a variety of vectorial holograms, with high dimensional information that surpass the limits of liquid crystals or optical photoresists.
Among the existing techniques employed to achieve highly desired optical properties, polarization multiplexing (multiple signal integration) is an attractive method. The strong cross-talk associated with such platforms can, however, be prevented with birefringent metasurfaces (two-dimensional surfaces with two different refractive indices) composed of a single meta-atom per unit-cell for optimized polarization multiplexing.
The longer-term answer is to develop and scale up the quantum communication network and, subsequently, the quantum internet. This will take major investments from governments. However, countries will benefit from the greater security offered13. For example, Canada keeps its census data secret for 92 years, a term that only quantum cryptography can assure. Government agencies could use quantum-secured blockchain platforms to protect citizens’ personal financial and health data. Countries leading major research efforts in quantum technologies, such as China, the United States and members of the European Union, will be among the early adopters. They should invest immediately in research. Blockchains should be a case study for Europe’s Quantum Key Distribution Testbed programme, for example.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will founder unless they integrate quantum technologies, warn Aleksey K. Fedorov, Evgeniy O. Kiktenko and Alexander I. Lvovsky. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will founder unless they integrate quantum technologies, warn Aleksey K. Fedorov, Evgeniy O. Kiktenko and Alexander I. Lvovsky.
A new report says it could take more than a decade to develop new cryptography schemes to keep data secure when quantum computers hit prime time.
