Quantum provides tremendous opportunities for innovation and brings with it potential game-changing impacts on agency missions. For these reasons, agencies can and should begin to think about where and how to use quantum within their organizations and should also begin applying it. Doing that begins with considering and weighing the mission value of three important quantum capabilities: quantum computing, quantum sensing and quantum networking.

Quantum Computing: A Rapidly Maturing Field with a Growing Ecosystem

Quantum computing has matured rapidly in the last several years, largely due to the availability of quantum programming tools and technical advancements in machine design, development, and manufacturing. Today, many vendors are producing, shipping and installing quantum machines and are building roadmaps for machines with exponentially larger compute power – with the goal of making those more powerful machines available over the coming months and years.

Additionally, quantum computing capabilities are now accessible through commercial cloud service providers. Open source quantum software stacks and software as a service (SaaS) quantum programing environments are also available to support the deployment of quantum algorithms to a range of cloud accessible quantum systems.

Due to this level of maturity and the large and growing ecosystem, quantum computing use cases range from cryptography to drug development and financial modeling, to logistics, search and natural language processing.

Quantum Sensing: A Quickly Evolving Space, Ideal for Detection and Edge Use Cases

Quantum sensing provides many benefits that can augment, enhance or even replace the existing state-of-the-art sensors at low cost. Remotely sensed, non-intrusive quantum detection has applications in national security (defense and homeland security), health care (non-intrusive detection and monitoring), and materials analysis (material identification, composition and strength), to name a few examples.

This is a quickly evolving field of research and productization that in many cases uses off-the-shelf components that are manufactured at low cost and support supply chain security as well. Data generated by quantum sensors can link to AI/ML systems and the sensors themselves enable capture, processing and analysis at the edge.

When these capabilities are married to the emerging quantum networking field, the analytic possibilities will increase exponentially. When combined with advances in quantum networking, this enables the direct transfer of quantum states to quantum processors, paving the way for seamless, end-to-end quantum information handling.

Quantum Networking: Emerging Domain for Solving Complex Problems

Quantum networking’s promise involves linking quantum processors, machines and data centers to pass quantum-state information seamlessly between systems – even quantum systems with different modalities – as well as enable direct processing of quantum-sensed data. The ability to pass quantum states between systems with low to no error rates will cause the explosion of quantum processing potential.

Here’s what that looks like in practice: First, quantum networking will allow quantum states to pass from one quantum processing unit (QPU) to another, effectively expanding the available quantum bits (qubits) that can be used in an algorithm. Then, processing will be connected to memory and storage, which creates machines that can run increasingly larger quantum circuits and workflows. The linking of quantum computers across datacenters usher in quantum solutions that could not be executed on single machines. The impact of a complete quantum system like this is difficult to quantify because mankind has yet to experience it. Pretty incredible.

Start Learning, Start Now

Within each of these three quantum capabilities there are, of course, necessary investments and training needed to understand and identify quantum use cases, access quantum technology, build algorithms, upskill the workforce, integrate into classic computing workflows and add value to the mission. Starting now enables teams to generate the greatest value and impact on the mission. It also enables organizations and agencies to look at hybrid implementations that may generate the fastest, greatest returns.

Without question, across the quantum spectrum, there is a growing ecosystem of quantum partners and tools to help across all three areas. Exploring quantum use cases for your organization will enable building a quantum foundation to bring mission value and as quantum capabilities continue to grow.