Boulder experts hail potential of quantum computing

BOULDER — Experts who spoke Tuesday at the Boulder Chamber’s Economic Summit weren’t shy about touting the potential of quantum computing, but they were even more forceful in their pride in Boulder’s role in advancing the fledgling industry.

“Quantum will end infectious disease, it will cure cancer, it’ll turn back the clock on climate change,” declared Corban Tillemann-Dick, founder and CEO of Maybell Quantum Industries, “and right now there is nowhere better to do it than Colorado. We’re literally leading the world in this technology.

“Those changes aren’t going to happen in two or three years,” said Tillemann-Dick. “This is a civilization-defining technology, and we’re at the beginning of the journey, but this is the right place to do it. It’s grown out of the phenomenal work at CU Boulder.”

Speakers at the summit’s open session at the Boulder Jewish Community Center, including new University of Colorado Boulder chancellor Justin Schwartz; U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo.; and Eve Lieberman, director of the state’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade, were profuse in their praise of research at the university and local laboratories, but they reserved special kudos for the budding world of quantum computing.

“Quantum science and technology is what I would describe as the poster child for the impact a university can have on the world by connecting basic science to technological development with a true commitment over decades,” Schwartz said. “These things don’t happen overnight.”

The university got a major boost in July when the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Tech Hub program granted Elevate Quantum, a nonprofit consortium of about 70 stakeholders who represent industry, academia, capital and laboratories in Colorado and New Mexico, a Phase 2 Tech Hub designation that unlocked $127 million in state and federal funds, which are expected to generate several billion more dollars of private investment in the region’s quantum industry.

Zachary Yerushalmi, CEO of the nonprofit Elevate Quantum, described the award as “the first major place-based investment that the U.S. government has ever made in the quantum industry.”

Quantum theory attempts to explain the behavior of matter at atomic and subatomic levels. Because quantum computers take advantage of special properties of quantum systems such as superposition, their computing power and speed is exponentially greater than a traditional computer.

Schwartz said Tillemann-Dick “described it to me as the difference in computing speed between an abacus and today’s computers.” And that difference, he added, “is actually smaller than the potential difference in computing speed between today’s computers and a quantum computer.”

Tillemann-Dick explained that “the whole basis of technology as we know it today is being able to answer simple yes-or-no questions quickly. That technology has changed the world in really profound ways. The exciting thing about quantum is that it is a reinvention of the technology that has profoundly more capability and almost unimaginable impact.

“Where in classical computers you have wires that are either charged or not charged,” he said, “in a quantum computer you have these systems that instead of being based on ones and zeroes, ons and offs that are examined one at a time one after another, quickly, a trillion times a second in your cell phone, you can take computational tasks that are fairly impossible for classical computers and make them trivially easy to solve.”

He described a futuristic scenario that could make a huge difference in health care.

“Penicillin is not that big a molecule, but to model penicillin accurately with a classical computer, you would need more transistors, more of those charged wires, than there are atoms in the observable universe,” Tillemann-Dick said. “With a quantum computer, you can model penicillin. We’ll live in a world where you walk into the doctor’s office, you spit into a tube or they do a skin scraping, and while you’re sitting in the waiting room, they will produce new medicine that cures everything wrong with you and has no side effects.”

For decades, Schwartz noted, “CU research into quantum physics has led to incredible scientific breakthroughs – literally four Nobel prizes since 2001. It’s not only the highest concentration of quantum Nobel laureates anywhere on the planet. I can’t think of any topic that has had four Nobel prizes in one community over a 24-year period.

“If the story ended there, it would be an amazing accomplishment for CU Boulder to have done it, but the story doesn’t end there.”

He hailed the work of JILA, a joint institute of CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology that was founded in 1962 as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics.

“That partnership has helped us think not just about quantum science, but how do we take it into an implementation phase, an impact phase,” Schwartz said. “We are now at the point where we are leveraging that deep well of knowledge and applying the findings to innovations that are transforming lives.

“The incubator will bring together industry and research in quantum to quickly move innovations from the lab into technology and into the economy. And students are going to play a huge role. They’re not a second thought to us; they’re integral to what we do.”

Schwartz described the school’s workforce development strategy as being formulated “so that as the quantum economy grows, the workforce is in Colorado to support it. Workforce is a critical piece of the supply chain. We anticipate — we expect — Colorado and the Mountain West to be the dominant region for quantum technology in the U.S. and the globe for years to come. We can do it. We have the capacity.”

Atomic clocks and GPS systems are examples of quantum computing that exist today, Yerushalmi said, adding that “the job now is to radically bring forward the pace and the horizon of these technologies and make sure everybody across the region and country has a seat at the table.” The biggest risk, he added, is “the risk of doing nothing.”

Wendy Lea, chair of Energize Colorado, chief instigator of TechHubNow! and an Elevate Quantum board member, said Boulder’s reputation as a technology hub was built through grants and legislation advocated by Govs. John Hickenlooper and Jared Polis as well as workforce legislation Polis pushed through.

“But we can’t do this alone,” she said. “Who will make us successful in our state are our consortium partners, the ecosystem.”

Tillemann-Dick predicted that “quantum’s going to drive $3.5 trillion a year in economic value as it comes to scale.

“That number is like somebody in the 1950s saying, ‘This is what a computer is good for.’ It is almost certainly a vast understatement of the economic impact associated with quantum. Importantly, the jobs associated with building that quantum future. 

“You need some brilliant physicists who can solve the tough problems of quantum, but my company, we’re an infrastructure company,” he said. “We are almost 90% folks without advanced degrees who didn’t study physics. We are welders and machinists and technicians who are building the stuff of quantum. It’s going to mature the way the aerospace industry has – with some brilliant scientists solving incredibly hard challenges and a whole bunch of people building stuff. And the stuff they build is going to transform the world in really fundamental ways that hopefully make the lives of everyone better.

“Those changes aren’t going to happen in two or three years. This is a civilization-defining technology, and we’re at the beginning of the journey, but this is the right place to do it,” he said. “It’s grown out of the phenomenal work at CU Boulder.”

“When you’re talking about translational scale,” added Yerushalmi, “all roads, all around the world, come to Boulder.”

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