Quantum materials R&D forges ahead
- PDF / 1,960,816 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 585 x 783 pts Page_size
- 97 Downloads / 140 Views
Quantum materials R&D forges ahead
D
espite the funding and safety protocols that have slowed down R&D in various scientific fields except for COVID-19-related work this year due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, federal governments around the world have kept quantum projects on-track. “‘Quantum’ has not slowed down— there were a lot of research initiatives announced this summer and [our project] is a program to support quantum education,” says Emily Edwards of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, co-principal investigator of Q2Work, a program funded by the US National Science Foundation. Anna Grassellino, director of Fermilab’s Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center (SQMS), and David Awschalom, director of Argonne National Laboratory’s Next Generation Quantum Science and Engineering Center
(Q-NEXT), each began receiving funds for their quantum centers. The US Department of Energy announced this summer that they will provide USD$625 million over five years to fund five National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, including SQMS and Q-NEXT. In the UK, Dominic O’Brien, director, and David Lucas, principal investigator, head up the UK Quantum Computing & Simulation Hub, which began its five-year program at the end of 2019. The Hub is a collaboration of 17 universities and more than 25 industrial and government partners and is led by the University of Oxford. The current Hub was preceded by the Networked Quantum Information Technologies Hub (NQIT), which ran from 2014 to 2019. The UK focuses its quantum initiative on technology, launching the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme in
David Awschalom, a physicist at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, reviews data from a quantum information experiment with a graduate student in his laboratory. Credit: University of Chicago.
2013. From 2014 to 2019, UK Research and Innovation invested £120 million (~USD$156 million) for four quantum technology hubs managed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The four hubs then received £94 million (~USD$122 million) for the next five years comprising the second phase. Tadashi Sakai, R&D manager of Q-LEAP’s (Quantum Leap Flagship Program) Quantum Metrology & Sensing, a 10-year program in Japan commissioned by the Government of Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), says, “Following the government’s state of emergency [due to COVID-19], we were forced to refrain from activities for about two months. During that time, we stopped experiments. It is now back to almost normal activity levels.” In its FY 2020 budget highlights released earlier this year, MEXT includes ¥3.2 billion (~USD$30 million) for its Q-LEAP initiative. This represents an increase by ¥1 billion (~USD$9.5 million) from FY 2019 and exemplifies Japan’s 10-year Fifth Science and Technology Basic Plan known as Society 5.0 (approved by the Japanese Cabinet in January 2016). In Society 5.0, the government’s emphasis is on an “inclusive society” that va
Data Loading...
