Ruslan Yunusov, General Director of the Russian Quantum Center, spoke about what the new technology will give mankind
Humanity is approaching another technological milestone that will change the world as dramatically as taming fire, reinventing the wheel, or discovering electricity. The last time a similar Rubicon was passed in front of our generation and was associated with the advent of computers. Now, according to scientists, we are at a distance of several years from the next revolution - the emergence of a quantum computer. And these are not just nice words: the European Union announced that it will invest 1 billion euros in the Quantum Flagship program. For comparison, this is a quarter of the cost of the Large Hadron Collider - the largest scientific installation that has ever been created in the history of civilization.
Our place in the new world largely depends on whether Russia joins the number of countries-winners of the quantum race or misses the next technological leap. To be on the sidelines would be especially offensive, because roughly speaking, two-thirds of the world's leading quantum physics professors have Russian surnames, although they often work at different universities in the world. To use this potential of ours, the Russian Quantum Center gathered the best minds at a conference in London.
I talked to the general director of the Russian Quantum Center, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Ruslan Yunusov about why the people need quantum technologies.
Ruslan, first, answer the naive question: why do we need quantum computers at all? What does the current one do not suit you? Indeed, according to Moore's law, and so every two years, the power of electronic devices doubles, so why not solve new problems by increasing the computational capabilities of classical computers?
- At the very beginning, Moore's law was formulated differently: the number of transistors doubles every 1.5 years. But now progress is slowing down and doubling occurs every 2 years. Now let's look at other parameters, for example, the clock speed, which determines the speed of the computer. Here we have reached the ceiling already 10 years ago. If you recall, 30 years ago, good devices had a frequency of 1 megahertz, after 20 years we reached 1 gigahertz, that is, the processor began to work 1000 times faster. And then they reached 3 gigaHertz and stagnation set in. Because we got to the physical limits. Even purely theoretically, we cannot increase the clock frequency above 10 gigahertz. Here is an example for you when technology runs into some physical limits. If you look further, then literally in five years we will run into another barrier. You said that according to the new version of Moore's Law, the number of transistors in microcircuits should double. And soon we will come to the fact that a single transistor must be composed of atoms. And this is already impossible.
What to do?
- One of the solutions is just quantum computers. They will allow you to quickly solve some problems that are generally inaccessible to a classical computer. The simplest application is to break codes, decrypt secret messages. What a classical computer will take billions of years to do, a quantum computer with a capacity of 1000 qubits (a qubit is an element of information in a quantum computer, like a bit in a classical computer - author) will do it in minutes. Another application of a quantum computer is to search for data in large databases. Now, huge amounts of data are simply stored without processing, in the hope that someday there will be large computing power that can analyze this data. Quantum computers can do it.
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What are the chances that the first quantum computer will be Russian?
- Minimal, because a quantum computer will not appear in 1 day. The same sequence of steps: first you need to make one qubit, then 2, 10, 30 … Already with 300 qubits, you can solve a range of problems that are beyond the power of supercomputers. Now we expect 50-qubit universal computers to appear in the next 3 years. Most likely, this will happen in the United States or in Europe with the participation of American companies. For comparison, a project has been launched in Russia to create a computer with 2 qubits. That is, we are lagging behind the leading players, but nevertheless we are entering the circle of countries that are developing these technologies. So far, our level of investment is incommensurable. Google alone is investing $ 100 million in quantum development, and we have a consortium that deals with two qubits in total has much less. But here, like in a marathon: it is important not only to win,but just run. Because if you finished at least in the second wave, you will get market share. Today an adequate task for Russia is to be in the group of leaders.
Can you estimate the size of the market? How big is the jackpot that the participants in the quantum race are competing for?
- To give numbers is completely thankless, but we somehow estimated that the market for semiconductors and lasers is about $ 3 trillion a year. There are expectations that the new market will be no less. When quantum technologies really enter every home, the market will be absolutely gigantic.
And what can they bring to every home? What is the use of an ordinary person if a quantum computer solves tricky scientific problems?
- For example, an ordinary person will like bank cards from which it is impossible to steal money. This absolute protection is provided by quantum cryptography. By the way, such secure communications can already be bought in the West, and we plan to have these devices by the end of the year. Quantum computers and quantum simulators can make it possible to find materials with new properties. Today the car weighs 2 tons and will weigh … 20 kilograms. You can pick it up by hand and put it somewhere on the shelf. From the point of view of physics, there are no prohibitions here, but conventional computer technologies do not allow us to find such solutions. And a quantum computer is capable of simulating material with these properties. Or superconductivity at room temperature. They have been fighting over this problem for many decades, but cannot solve it. And this will completely turn our life around:we will forget what energy losses are. We will be able to create powerful magnetic fields that will hold flying cars and magnetic levitation trains. They will travel at the speed of an airplane and are very cheap.
You are talking about cooperation with Western partners. What can we offer them? We don't have much money. There are strong scientists, but many of them today work in Western universities …
- Oddly enough, we have a lot of scientists who successfully realized themselves in the West, but returned and launched laboratories in Russia. It is very useful for us to support such projects. Thus, schools with world experience are created within our country.
Yaroslav KOROBATOV