Major investments in quantum technology have already been made in the United States, China, Germany, Canada, India, Japan, and several other countries. Now the UAE is joining the race, hoping to build the expertise that will be required to solve the kinds of problems only quantum computers will be able to solve.
In partnership with Barcelona-based startup Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech, Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) formed the Quantum Research Centre (QRC), a new international centre of excellence for research into quantum technologies. The centre’s Chief Researcher is Dr José Ignacio Latorre, who took a leave of absence from his full professorship in theoretical physics at the University of Barcelona to work on a series of projects involving particle physics.
TII is the dedicated “applied research” pillar of Abu Dhabi’s newly established Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). “We are at the cusp of a new era with the advent of quantum computing,” Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of ATRC, said in an official statement. “We are proud to embark on building one of these wonderful machines which will help us in various fields, from discovering new medicines to making new materials to designing better batteries to various Artificial Intelligence applications.”
While quantum computers will never be able to perform the vast majority of the algorithms supercomputers perform today, there is a small set of problems quantum computers will be able to solve much quicker than supercomputers. In fact, in some cases—for example, decryption of RSA keys—supercomputers are so slow they could not even find a solution in a billion years.
Most experts agree that the two practical applications we can reasonably expect from quantum computers within a decade are simulating natural phenomena that have quantum mechanical properties and solving optimization problems. The most enticing case of the former is where pharmaceuticals use quantum computers to simulate biological molecules to develop new drugs much more quickly. A good case of the latter is where a logistics company needs to figure out the optimal routes for a fleet of trucks to deliver to several dozen cities.
QRC plans to work with other scientific institutes and industrial partners to conduct basic research and to launch new projects involving several kinds of quantum technologies—including quantum cryptography, quantum communications and quantum sensing. But the most tangible output from the centre in the near future will be a usable quantum computer, which will be based on superconducting circuits, much like the machines already built by Google and IBM.
To keep the circuits down to superconducting temperatures, a giant cryostat was developed by the Finnish company Bluefors and delivered to Abu Dhabi in August 2021. A helium dilution refrigerator uses a mixture of helium isotopes to cool components down to the temperatures they need to operate. The top level of the refrigerator is at room temperature, with five other layers underneath, each with successively lower temperatures down to the lowest layer, which is at 10 milikelvin (mK) or 273.14 Celsius.
“The first step in the process is to build a laboratory, equip it and complete installation of the cleanroom equipment, all of which is on track. Once done, the first qubits will be prepared, characterised and benchmarked. We expect the first simple quantum chips ‘Made in Abu Dhabi’ should come by the end of the summer,” said Professor Latorre in a QRC press release on April 21, 2021.
Like most organizations that build quantum computers, the QRC overran their stated schedule. However, they can be forgiven, because their plan to start out small seems sound in a field where hyperbole is the norm.
The Abu Dhabi team’s reasonable ambition is to first experiment with one qubit, then two and three to learn to manage the inherent instability of qubits and the ways qubits are measured. Eventually, the centre expects to produce a usable quantum computer based on a relatively small number of high-quality qubits.
It will take a long time for the QRC to catch up to IBM, who offer access to their quantum computers on the cloud. IBM recently announced progress towards a 127-qubit system, which will far surpass anything that has been accomplished so far.
The idea behind quantum computing began in the early 1980s, when Richard Feynman and other physicists pointed out that quantum mechanical systems could never be simulated with digital computers, because they have too many variables to be represented by standard hardware. However, if a computer based on quantum mechanics could be developed, then such a computer could be used to simulate physics.
Mathematicians and physicists continued to develop the idea throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with a notable breakthrough from Peter Shor, and MIT mathematician, who discovered quantum error correcting costs and fault-tolerant methods that would make it possible to perform quantum computing, even when the underlying hardware is noisy. Shor also demonstrated mathematically how quantum computing could one day factor large prime numbers—and even break RSA encryption very quickly.
Since then, Google, IBM and Microsoft have all built quantum computers, and so have several startups—including Rigetti, D-Wave and Xanadu. Software development kits are now available for the general public to experiment with developing algorithms to solve the kinds of problems quantum computers can solve; and cloud services offered by IBM and Rigetti allow people to run their code on a real quantum computer.
But researchers call the present era of quantum computing the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, because the current generation of quantum computing hardware is highly susceptible to noise. QRC is hoping its first system will be a second-generation quantum computer based on quality qubits and measuring techniques that are much more reliable.
