Quantum technology

Quantum technology is a new field of physics and engineering, which transitions some of the properties of quantum mechanics, especially quantum entanglement, quantum superposition and quantum tunnelling, into practical applications such as quantum computing, quantum sensing, quantum cryptography, quantum simulation, quantum metrology and quantum imaging.

Quantum superposition states can be very sensitive to a number of external effects, such as electric, magnetic and gravitational fields; rotation, acceleration and time, and therefore can used to make very accurate sensors. There are many experimental demonstrations of quantum sensing devices, such as the experiments carried out by the nobel laureate William D. Phillips on using cold atom interferometer systems to measure gravity and the atomic clock which is used by many national standards agencies around the world to define the second.

Recent efforts are being made to engineer quantum sensing devices, so that they are cheaper, easier to use, more portable, lighter and consume less power. It is believed that if these efforts are successful, it will lead to multiple commercial markets, such as for the monitoring of oil and gas deposits, or in construction.

Quantum secure communication are methods which are expected to be 'quantum safe' in the advent of a quantum computing systems that could break current cryptography systems. One significant component of a quantum secure communication systems is expected to be Quantum key distribution, or 'QKD': a method of transmitting information using entangled light in a way that makes any interception of the transmission obvious to the user.

Quantum computers are the ultimate quantum network, combining 'quantum bits' or 'qubit' which are devices which can store and process quantum data (as opposed to binary data) with links that can transfer quantum information between qubits. In doing this, quantum computers are predicted to calculate certain algorithms significantly faster than even the largest classical computer available today.

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