FactualThis disruptive technology comes out of research laboratories and gives birth to hundreds of start-ups supported by large companies and governments. France will devote 1.8 billion euros to it over the next four years.
No less than 10 billion dollars in China, 1.2 billion in the United States, 1.3 billion in the United Kingdom, 2.6 billion euros in Germany, 1.8 billion in France, but also in India, in Japan, in Russia, in Canada, in Israel… The announcements are raining at the moment around rather elusive innovations: quantum technologies. In a few years, one of them, the quantum computer, which was the business of research laboratories and scientists dreaming of the Nobel Prize in physics, has become a strategic subject for many companies and governments. And for good reason. This type of quantum computer breaks the limits of current computing. Millions of times more powerful and infinitely faster, it opens up a whole new field of applications previously inaccessible. Develop synthetic molecules to capture CO2, rapidly develop new drugs by simulating an infinite number of possibilities, imagine new materials for the batteries of the future, anticipate climatic events to evacuate populations in time …
If quantum theory was formalized almost a century ago, the idea of exploiting the properties of this new branch of physics to create a computer more powerful than conventional computers dates from the 1970s. is that quantum computing has recently emerged from the research fold. “In the last fifteen years, there has been a lot of money injected into this field and a great deal of scientific progress, which has enabled the development of the basic unit of quantum, the qubit. We were able to build the first machines and develop software ”, notes Olivier Hess, director of the IBM Quantum Hub France.
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Admittedly, the first machines that saw the light of day at the Canadian D-Wave, IBM, Google, Intel, Microsoft or Atos look more like prototypes than commercial computers, but they make it possible to identify the problems that could be processed by quantum technology, to develop software and experiment with it. Because quantum computing requires reinventing the whole algorithm. “The number of patents filed on the subject has increased sharply since 2012 while the number of scientific publications is relatively stable. This shows that the subject has moved from laboratories to industry ”, notes Michel Kurek, engineer and tradesman, author of a report on the subject.
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