Ahem. National effort required to kick-start the era of quantum-enabled scientific discovery and keep America ahead of the game
President Trump has ordered the development of a quantum computer to ensure that the US maintains a strategic technical advantage, along with a nationwide migration to post-quantum cryptography to protect sensitive data against just such a computer.In an executive order signed Monday, Trump directed various federal agencies to establish a national program to deliver a quantum computer, aimed at driving scientific discoveries and keeping the US at the forefront of technology.To be precise, it calls for “the first ever quantum computer powerful enough to initiate the era of quantum-enabled scientific discovery and accelerate quantum capabilities for commercial applications.”
Trump’s order directs the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST), Michael Kratsios, to coordinate the effort across the Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce, and the Intelligence Community, as well as with the broader industry and research communities.
The program is to be given the somewhat clumsy moniker of Quantum Computer for Application Development and Discovery Science (QC-ADDS), and the intent is to deliver at least one such computer to a Department of Energy (DoE) facility and make it available to the scientific community.Kratsios told reporters that the administration believes that this goal can be achieved by 2028, so that at least one full-blown quantum system will be operating by the time Trump leaves office.This is a bold claim, as quantum computers are one of those technologies where a big breakthrough has been promised to be just around the corner for decades, yet never seems to arrive.Quantum computing still has a number of challenges to solve, primarily the error correction problem, as quantum bits (qubits) are extremely sensitive to noise and will easily lose their quantum properties, like superposition and entanglement, through interference from the environment.
