Written evidence submitted by York Centre for Quantum Technologies (QUA0025)

Title:  Uptake issues caused by lack of talent and political difficulties surrounding quantum communications.

Author:  York Centre for Quantum Technologies (YCQT) Management Board

Details about the YCQT can be found on the website

https://www.york.ac.uk/quantum-technologies/

Supply of qualified talent at several levels. Many companies are reporting a difficulty in hiring, and indeed we have experience of the difficulty of hiring highly-qualified people at the postdoc level. This is slowing the progress of quantum technology research in this country. Potential ways to address it include funding more quantum tech related PhDs, either through CDTs or a prioritisation of funding for PhD students. In our experience there are often numerous highly-qualified overseas candidates unable to take the studentship and we are left to hire weaker UK candidates or not to hire at all. Allowing the hiring of overseas candidates would help. Government is usually against this because they wish to prioritise training of UK nationals, but PhD students should be thought of more analogously to trainee employees – it is more important, and better for UK research productivity to take the best people regardless of nationality. Funding weaker students because they are from the UK is a poor use of the limited resources because a weak student can require a significant amount of the supervisor’s time with little or no increase in research productivity, while a strong one increases the productivity of the supervisor significantly. Moreover, the research outcome generated by good students remains in the UK, often in the form of enhanced, better equipped, laboratories.

This leads on to another supply problem, which is qualified UK graduates to become PhD students. Here the government could encourage universities to diversify their undergraduate offering in quantum information and related topics. In many departments there is one final-year specialist course, sometimes with teaching starting after PhD applications have been made.  Embedding it earlier into undergraduate syllabuses would mean more students are exposed to these topics leading to a larger demand for PhD positions in quantum technologies by UK nationals. This could also mitigate the problem of more qualified overseas students.

Difficulty of obtaining ATAS/visas

We have had cases of students and postgraduates who are able to obtain a precious overseas place later withdrawn because of severe delays in obtaining ATAS (Academic Technology Approval Scheme). One case involved a student applying in March and having no response before September at which point he withdrew and took up a place elsewhere. A similar case applied to a postdoctoral researcher who had to withdraw an already accepted offer in the UK because the ATAS was denied after she waited for it for 8 months. She is now working in Poland. Another case applied to a Chinese postdoc who has been working in the UK for 7 years and planned to move to the UK permanently, but he was denied the ATAS certificate after he spent only a few months back in China. Apparently it is next to impossible to contact the ATAS people or to get any update or feedback on an application.

We would like to see more efficient ways to recruit from abroad, including a fairer playing field in terms of funding for overseas students and postdocs. Some cases, like the ones described above, are exceptional and should be treated as such. 

There have also been cases of highly qualified postdoctoral researchers from EU Countries whose visas have been delayed for months because of the unclear/unfriendly post-Brexit rules. One specific example involved a researcher of Polish nationality whose visa process was delayed for several months, even after the researcher had accepted the post and all remaining issues – apart from the visa – were resolved. Making it difficult for highly skilled scientists to work in the UK risks affecting UK leadership and competitiveness in this field. The UK has been seen for a long time as the-place-to-go for quantum technologies; these unfriendly policies risk making the UK the-place-to-avoid.

The race for quantum computer scalability and commercialization

The last 10-15 years have seen an exponentially increasing interest in R&D investment by companies, including multinationals, in the development of quantum computers, mirrored by an exponential increase in the size of available quantum processors. By quantum computers/processors here we refer not only to the quantum counterparts of traditional computers, but also to quantum annealers, specialising in optimization algorithms, and to the so-called boson sampling machines, important to demonstrate quantum advantage over traditional computers. The first company to commercialise a quantum computer was the  Canadian D-Wave (https://www.dwavesys.com/ ). It started in 2007 by presenting a 16-qubit annealer, Orion. In 2010 it increased its machines to 128 qubits, in 2015 it delivered a machine with over 1,000 qubits to NASA Ames Research Center, and today it supports machines with 5000+ qubits. IBM entered the race for quantum advantage and quantum supremacy in 2017 “IBM to build quantum computers, selling machines millions of times faster than anything made before [...]The company has set up a new division, IBM Q, that is intended to make quantum computers and sell them commercially.” (The Independent, 6 March 2017). It has a dedicated division, IBM Quantum (https://www.ibm.com/quantum) and its machines may perform gate-based quantum computation, the quantum equivalent of traditional computation. While the initial 5 and 7 qubit IBM quantum processors are still available for free via online access, their commercial premium machines are now behind a pay-wall with their current flagship being the 127-qubit Eagle systems. IBM  has unveiled the  433-qubit (‘Osprey’) system in 2022 and has  a published quantum roadmap foreseeing a 10-fold increase in the number of qubits by 2025. The UK Ministry of Defense is one of the clients of ORCA computing, which is developing a quantum computer using boson sampling,  a “Photonic Quantum Systems for Machine Learning”. ORCA currently leads a £11.6 million Quantum Data Centre of the Future grant from the UK government.

The data above show the current exponential increase of both size and power of quantum computers. We approve and support  the UK Government investments in quantum computing which has brought the UK to the international forefront of this technology. Given the great promises for the future market share of this exponentially growing sector, we hope that the UK Government will continue to substantially  support the sector.

QKD vs post-quantum cryptography

The development of quantum computers evidenced in the previous section represents an imminent threat for the confidentiality of communications over existing infrastructure. ‘Quantum safe’ solutions, of which QKD is a natural example, aim to protect against such a threat. In spite of the high level of security and impressive progress of the last decades, QKD still faces issues in confidence of its uptake as well as political resistance in places. For instance, ANSSI, the National French Agency for Cybersecurity discouraged its use in this paper, instead favouring less developed “post-quantum” cryptography (PQC) algorithms (classical algorithms hoped to be secure against quantum computers). This position has not been challenged by other cyber security centres, including the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). The risks associated with security breaches in post-quantum algorithms have been highlighted e.g. in [1,2,3]. A strategy based only on implementing and updating PQC over the years, clearly, does not rule out the possibility of store-today-decrypt-later attacks, similarly to what has been discussed for years regarding RSA cryptosystems against quantum attacks. By embracing a development strategy based exclusively on PQC, rather than on the synergic interaction between Quantum & PQC, we might gain some more time to protect information against quantum threats, but we would remain vulnerable towards a serious worst-case scenario that, given the impressive acceleration experienced by commercial quantum processors during the last 5 years, would be very risky to overlook.

We would like to see more research into the relative merits of QKD and PQC, and possible hybrid schemes. The quantum and post-quantum cryptography communities remain relatively disconnected (in spite of their similar goals), and sometimes seem to be in competition. In part this is because of the different mathematics needed and the different backgrounds such researchers have. We believe that bringing these two communities together would help understanding on all fronts, increasing awareness and enabling discussion of possible hybrid solutions, which are currently rarely mentioned.

16 May 2023

York Centre for Quantum Technologies Management Board

Prof. Marco Lucamarini

Prof. Irene D’Amico

Prof. Roger Colbeck

Dr. Carlo Ottaviani