[House Hearing, 115 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
AMERICAN LEADERSHIP
IN QUANTUM TECHNOLOGY
=======================================================================
JOINT HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY &
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
OCTOBER 24, 2017
__________
Serial No. 115-32
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
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COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HON. LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas, Chair
FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
DANA ROHRABACHER, California ZOE LOFGREN, California
MO BROOKS, Alabama DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois
RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon
BILL POSEY, Florida ALAN GRAYSON, Florida
THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky AMI BERA, California
JIM BRIDENSTINE, Oklahoma ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut
RANDY K. WEBER, Texas MARC A. VEASEY, Texas
STEPHEN KNIGHT, California DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia
BRIAN BABIN, Texas JACKY ROSEN, Nevada
BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia JERRY MCNERNEY, California
BARRY LOUDERMILK, Georgia ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado
RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana PAUL TONKO, New York
DRAIN LaHOOD, Illinois BILL FOSTER, Illinois
DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida MARK TAKANO, California
JIM BANKS, Indiana COLLEEN HANABUSA, Hawaii
ANDY BIGGS, Arizona CHARLIE CRIST, Florida
ROGER W. MARSHALL, Kansas
NEAL P. DUNN, Florida
CLAY HIGGINS, Louisiana
RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina
------
Subcommittee on Research and Technology
HON. BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia, Chair
FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois
RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut
STEPHEN KNIGHT, California JACKY ROSEN, Nevada
DARIN LaHOOD, Illinois SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon
RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana AMI BERA, California
DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia
JIM BANKS, Indiana EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
ROGER W. MARSHALL, Kansas
LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas
------
Subcommittee on Energy
HON. RANDY K. WEBER, Texas, Chair
DANA ROHRABACHER, California MARC A. VEASEY, Texas, Ranking
FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma Member
MO BROOKS, Alabama ZOE LOFGREN, California
RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois
THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky JACKY ROSEN, Nevada
JIM BRIDENSTINE, Oklahoma JERRY MCNERNEY, California
STEPHEN KNIGHT, California, Vice PAUL TONKO, New York
Chair JACKY ROSEN, Nevada
DRAIN LaHOOD, Illinois BILL FOSTER, Illinois
DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida AMI BERA, California
NEAL P. DUNN, Florida MARK TAKANO, California
LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
C O N T E N T S
October 24, 2017
Page
Witness List..................................................... 2
Hearing Charter.................................................. 3
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Lamar S. Smith, Chairman, Committee
on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 5
Written Statement............................................ 7
Statement by Representative Barbara Comstock, Chairwoman,
Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives........... 9
Written Statement............................................ 11
Statement by Representative Daniel Lipinski, Ranking Member,
Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives........... 13
Written Statement............................................ 15
Statement by Representative Randy K. Weber, Chairman,
Subcommittee on Energy, Committee on Science, Space, and
Technology, U.S. House of Representatives...................... 17
Written Statement............................................ 19
Statement by Representative Marc A. Veasey, Ranking Member,
Subcommittee on Energy, Committee on Science, Space, and
Technology, U.S. House of Representatives...................... 21
Written Statement............................................ 23
Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Ranking
Member, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House
of Representatives............................................. 25
Written Statement............................................ 26
Witnesses:
Panel I
Dr. Carl J. Williams, Acting Director, Physical Measurement
Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Oral Statement............................................... 27
Written Statement............................................ 30
Dr. Jim Kurose, Assistant Director, Computer and Information
Science and Engineering Directorate, National Science
Foundation
Oral Statement............................................... 37
Written Statement............................................ 39
Dr. John Stephen Binkley, Acting Director of Science, U.S.
Department of Energy
Oral Statement............................................... 52
Written Statement............................................ 54
Discussion....................................................... 70
Panel II
Dr. Scott Crowder, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
for Quantum Computing, IBM Systems Group
Oral Statement............................................... 90
Written Statement............................................ 92
Dr. Christopher Monroe, Distinguished University Professor & Bice
Zorn Professor, Department of Physics, University of Maryland;
Founder and Chief Scientist, IonQ, Inc.
Oral Statement............................................... 101
Written Statement............................................ 103
Dr. Supratik Guha, Director, Nanoscience and Technology Division,
Argonne National Laboratory; Professor, Institute for Molecular
Engineering, University of Chicago
Oral Statement............................................... 115
Written Statement............................................ 117
Discussion....................................................... 125
AMERICAN LEADERSHIP IN QUANTUM TECHNOLOGY
----------
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Research & Technology and
Subcommittee on Energy
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
Washington, D.C.
The Subcommittees met, pursuant to call, at 10:06 a.m., in
Room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Barbara
Comstock [Chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Research and
Technology] presiding.
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Chairwoman Comstock. The Committee on Science, Space and
Technology will come to order.
Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare
recesses of the Committee at any time.
Good morning, and welcome to today's joint hearing titled
``American Leadership in Quantum Technology.'' Due to a
scheduling conflict, I would like to first recognize the
Chairman of the full Committee for a statement, Mr. Smith.
Chairman Smith. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and let me
explain, I have a Judiciary markup. Otherwise I would be happy
to wait my turn, but I appreciate your deferring to me.
The technology that we will review today is complex but it
has the potential to revolutionize computing and to strengthen
or undermine our future economic and national security.
Quantum technology can completely transform many areas of
science and a wide array of technologies including sensors,
lasers, material science, GPS, and much more.
Quantum computers have the potential to solve complex
problems that are beyond the scope of today's most powerful
supercomputers. Quantum-enabled data analytics can
revolutionize the development of new medicines and materials
and assure security for sensitive information, but even Bill
Gates finds quantum technology to be challenging. He reportedly
said, ``I know a lot about physics and a lot of math. But the
one place where they put up slides and it is hieroglyphics,
it's quantum.''
We are fortunate this morning to be able to learn from
expert witnesses who thoroughly understand and can explain in
plain English all of quantum's complexities. How is that for a
setup?
Although the United States retains global leadership in the
theoretical physics that underpins quantum computing and
related technologies, we may be slipping behind others in
developing the quantum applications, programming know-how,
development of national security and commercial applications.
Just last year, Chinese scientists successfully sent the
first-ever quantum transmission from Earth to an orbiting
satellite. A team of Japanese scientists recently invented an
approach that apparently boosts calculating speed and
efficiency in quantum computing. And European research teams
are focusing on training quantum computer programmers and
developing essential software.
What if the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of quantum computing
are from Germany?
According to a 2015 McKinsey report, 7,000 scientists
worldwide, with a combined budget of about $1.5 billion, worked
on non-classified quantum technology. Of these totals, the
United States' estimated annual spending on non-classified
quantum-technology research was the largest. But China, Germany
and Canada were close behind. We need to continue to invest in
basic research.
We must also take steps to ensure that we have the
workforce that the future will demand. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics projects that employment in computer occupations
will increase by 12.5 percent, or nearly a half-million new
jobs, by 2024. That is more than any other STEM field. But
future jobs in engineering, health sciences and all of the
natural sciences will require computing and electronic
information skills.
The United States must also cultivate a new generation of
visionary entrepreneurs and additional millions of scientists,
engineers, designers, programmers and technicians who can
compete in quantum-enabled technologies and other emerging
fields.
I thank our witnesses today for testifying on this
important topic. I look forward to their testimony on the
current state of quantum research and their recommendations
about how to improve efforts in this area.
Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and I yield back.
[The prepared statement of Chairman Smith follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And I now recognize myself for a five minute opening
statement.
Good morning, and I think if Bill Gates is intimidated by
this topic, the rest of us mere mortals are very indebted to
our expert witnesses today, so thank you for joining us.
The topic of this morning's hearing, ``American Leadership
in Quantum Technology,'' is important to our national security,
global competitiveness and technological innovation. This
hearing will provide us with a view of U.S. and other nations'
research and development efforts to develop quantum computing
and related technology. It will also identify what, if more,
can be done to boost efforts.
R&D in information technology provides a greater
understanding of how to protect essential systems and networks
that support fundamental sectors of our economy, from emergency
communications and power grids to air-traffic control networks
and national defense systems. This kind of R&D works to prevent
or minimize disruptions to critical information infrastructure,
to protect public and private services, to detect and respond
to threats while mitigating the severity of and assisting in
the recovery from those threats, in an effort to support a more
stable and secure nation. As technology rapidly advances, the
need for research and development continues to evolve.
At the same time, I am hoping that we are preventing any
duplicative and overlapping R&D efforts, thereby enabling more
efficient use of government resources and taxpayer dollars.
Considering the significant increase in global
interconnectedness enabled by the internet, and with it,
increased cybersecurity attacks, the potential security and
offensive advantage that quantum computing and quantum
encryption may provide is more essential than ever.
Research in advanced materials and computer science
continues to push the envelope of classical computing power and
speed. Developments in quantum information science have raised
the prospects of a new computing architecture: quantum
computing. I am looking forward to our witnesses explaining
more about this architecture, including superposition and
interconnectivity.
As difficult as the underlying science is for many of us to
understand, it is easier to understand how quantum computing
can change the world by revolutionizing the encoding of
electronic information and supporting data analytics powerful
enough to solve currently complicated or inexplicable problems.
In today's hearing, I hope we are able to learn more about how
quantum technology will revolutionize computing and how to
promote continued technological leadership in the United
States.
I am also looking forward to learning how industry and
others are engaged. As noted in a 2015 PCAST report, ``Today's
advances rest on a strong base of research and development
created over many years of government and private investment.
Because of these investments, the United States has a vibrant
academia-industry-government ecosystem to support research and
innovation in IT and to bring the results into practical use.''
It is clear that focusing our investments on information
technology research and development is important to our nation
for a variety of reasons, including economic prosperity,
national security, U.S. competitiveness, and quality of life.
I look forward to the hearing.
[The prepared statement of Chairwoman Comstock follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. And I now will yield to the Ranking
Member, Mr. Lipinski, for his opening statement.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock and Chairman
Weber, for calling this hearing.
The last time this Committee focused on quantum technology
was in 2000 when a hearing was held on quantum and molecular
computing. The state of the science and technology has come a
long way since then, and so has the international competition.
The underlying theory of quantum mechanics began to take
shape in the 1920s. The first accurate atomic clock was built
in the 1950s. It wasn't labeled as a quantum technology, but it
took advantage of the quantum phenomenon known as
superposition. Physicist Richard Feynman first mused about the
possibility of quantum computers in 1981. In 1994,
mathematician Peter Shor developed the first efficient
algorithm for a quantum computer, demonstrating that quantum
computing, when it arrived, would topple our current system of
public-key encryption. Until then, quantum information science
was still largely the purview of physics departments.
In the years following Shor's breakthrough, quantum
information science became increasingly interdisciplinary,
attracting scientists and engineers from diverse fields.
As we will hear from the witnesses today, quantum
information science is at another significant turning point.
Publications and patent applications are on the rise. Small
companies are being formed. Major companies such as IBM,
Google, and Microsoft are accelerating their investments in
quantum-enabled technology.
I want to highlight in particular the research partnership
of the University of Chicago, Argonne National Lab, and Fermi
National Accelerator Lab, which has been dubbed the Chicago
Quantum Exchange. As we will hear from Dr. Guha, the Exchange
was created to develop and grow interdisciplinary
collaborations for the exploration and development of new
quantum-enabled technologies, and to help educate a new
generation of quantum information scientists and engineers.
Partnership with the private sector is also an important
element of the Exchange. The Chicago Quantum Exchange may be a
model for the future of R&D in quantum information science.
With respect to practical applications, the market for
quantum sensing and metrology is very close to taking off.
Technology developers envision a future in which quantum
sensors eliminate the need to use GPS satellites for
navigation, can be embedded in buildings to measure stress, can
be woven into clothing to monitor vital signs, and can even be
injected into our blood to help diagnose disease.
Another practical application is quantum communications.
This is an ultra secure method that uses quantum principles to
encode and distribute critical information, like encryption
keys, and will reveal if they were intercepted by a third party
in transit. Multiple countries are investing heavily in this
technology, which may be next in line for the commercial
market. The world especially took note of China's launch of a
quantum-enabled prototype communications satellite last year.
Quantum computing may be further from becoming a reality,
but the potential applications for both science and the
commercial market are mind-boggling. These are exciting
technologies. They also open the door to important policy
discussions.
As other countries are increasing their investments in
quantum technology, in some cases guided by long-term
strategies, now is the time for the U.S. to start developing a
more coherent strategy of our own. We must consider the scale,
scope and nature of federal investments, how best to facilitate
and strengthen partnerships with the private sector, and the
education and workforce training that will be required to power
a quantum revolution. I have no doubt other important policy
issues will emerge in this hearing, including, importantly, the
impact on cybersecurity.
I hope this hearing is followed by additional hearings in
this Congress and the coming years that more deeply explore
specific technologies and policy implications. In the meantime,
I look forward to today's introduction to quantum information
science and technology.
I thank all of the witnesses for being here this morning to
share your expertise, and I yield back the balance of my time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Lipinski follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, and I now recognize the
Chairman of the Energy Subcommittee, Mr. Weber, for his opening
statement.
Mr. Weber. Thank you, ma'am.
Good morning and welcome to today's joint Research and
Technology and Energy Subcommittee hearing. Today, we will hear
from a panel of experts on the status of America's research in
quantum technology, a field positioned to fundamentally change
the way we move and process data. Hearings like today's help
remind us of the Science Committee's core focus: the basic
research that provides the foundation for technology
breakthroughs. Before America ever sees the commercial
deployment of a quantum computer, a lot of discovery science
must be accomplished.
Quantum technology has the potential to completely reshape
our scientific landscape. I'm not going to attempt to explain
quantum computing to you all; I'll leave that to the experts
here today. But theoretically, quantum computing could allow
for the solution of exponentially large problems, things that
cannot be accomplished by even the fastest supercomputers
today. It could allow us to visualize the structures of complex
chemicals and materials, to model highly detailed flows of
potential mass evacuations with precise accuracy, and to
quantify subatomic interactions on the cutting edge of nuclear
research.
Quantum computing may also have profound implications for
cybersecurity technology. With China and Russia focusing their
efforts on quantum encryption, which could allow for 100
percent secure communications, it is absolutely imperative that
the United States maintain its leadership in this field.
In order to achieve this kind of revolutionary improvement
in technology, we are going to need foundational knowledge in
the advanced computing and materials science required to
construct quantum systems. For example, quantum hardware must
be equipped to completely isolate quantum processors from
outside forces.
Further, because quantum computing differs from today's
methods at the most basic level, quantum algorithms must be
built from the ground up. Support for basic research in
computer science and for computational partnerships between
industry, academia, and the national labs is necessary to
develop algorithms needed for future commercial quantum
systems.
The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science is the
leading federal sponsor of basic research in the physical
sciences, and funds robust quantum technology research. At
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the National Energy Research
Scientific Computing Center allows scientists to run
simulations of quantum architectures. At Argonne National Lab's
Center for Nanoscale Materials, researchers study atomic-scale
materials in order to engineer the characteristics of quantum
information systems. And at Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory, scientists are applying their experience in high-
energy physics to the study of quantum materials. DOE must
prioritize this kind of ground breaking basic research over
grants for technology that is ready for commercial deployment.
When the government steps in to push today's technology into
the market, it actually competes against private investors and
uses limited resources to do so. But when the government
supports basic research, everyone has the opportunity to access
the fundamental knowledge that can lead to the development of
future technologies.
I want to thank our accomplished panel of witnesses for
testifying today, and I look forward to a productive discussion
about the future of American quantum technology research. I
think I speak for my fellow members when I say that this is a
complex topic, and Congress will need to rely on experts like
you all to chart the course for quantum technologies.
I thank the Chair, and I yield back.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Weber follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I now recognize the
Ranking Member of the Energy Subcommittee, Mr. Veasey, for his
opening statement.
Mr. Veasey. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock and Chairman
Weber, for holding this hearing, and thank you to the
witnesses. I really appreciate you being here today. As was
mentioned, this is a very complex topic, and you being here,
providing your expertise, I think is going to come in very
handy today.
Quantum technologies have the potential to solve problems
that were previously out of reach and push scientific discovery
to new levels. A major breakthrough in this area could result
in a significant transformation in our communications systems,
computational methods, and even how we understand the world we
live in.
In addition to the distinguished group of researchers on
our second panel, I am also delighted that we will hear from
many of the most important federal agencies that lead our
nation's research in this very important field. I hope this
becomes a practice that we can expect for every relevant
hearing this committee holds. The activities within the federal
government that support the development of quantum technologies
cut across many agencies, as we will see by those testifying on
the first panel.
I should note that in addition to NIST, NSF, and DOE, there
are also a number of quantum-related activities taking place
within the Department of Defense in DARPA and the military
branches, as well as within the intelligence community.
In 2016, the Obama Administration published an interagency
working group report that highlighted the need for continued
investment across all these federal agencies. It also called
for stronger coordination and focused activities to address the
impediments to progress in this field. Congress has provided
consistent funding for these activities, though I would note
that in order to compete with countries like China, Japan,
Canada, and Italy, we will need to grow the investments that we
are already making.
Sadly, as we have come to expect with every hearing this
Committee holds highlighting an important area of research, you
can trust that the Trump Administration has proposed making
cuts. Vital research in quantum materials is happening within
the Department of Energy's Basic Energy Sciences program, and
yet this year the Trump Administration has proposed to cut this
critical program by $295 million, or 16 percent. While the
Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program saw a slight
increase in funding, most of that increase was to the exascale
computing project. The research portfolio within this program
that would actually support advancements in quantum computing
saw a 15 percent cut in the budget proposal released earlier
this year. This is not, this is not a path towards any sort of
technological breakthroughs or quantum leaps.
I would be remiss not to mention the Energy Frontier
Research Centers also. The centers have generally enjoyed
bipartisan support since the Obama Administration launched
these innovative research collaborations across our national
labs, universities, and industries. A few of these centers do
important work that has the potential to advance our
understanding of quantum technologies. They may provide us the
breakthroughs we need to launch this field to new heights.
While the Trump Administration also proposed cuts to these
centers, I hope and expect my colleagues in Congress will
continue to voice our strong support for researchers and their
vital work. Strong and sustained investment across our research
and innovation ecosystem is the only way we can expect to see
results from our world-class researchers at our national labs,
universities, and private companies. Quantum technologies are
certainly no different in that regard.
I look forward to hearing from both panels today on where
this field can take us and what exciting new possibilities are
on the horizon.
Thank you again, Madame Chair, and I'd like to yield back
the balance of my time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Veasey follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, and I now recognize the
Ranking Member of the full Committee for a statement, Mrs.
Johnson.
Ms. Johnson. Thank you very much, and good morning. I
really appreciate you for holding this important hearing, and I
want to thank the witnesses for being here today.
Quantum technology is an emerging field that will likely
have a large impact on our nation's competitiveness in the
industries of tomorrow. Its current and potential applications
are frankly too numerous to mention, as they range from
enabling vast improvements in our ability to discover and
develop new pharmaceuticals to ensuring the security of our
most critical infrastructure. So, as the Committee of the
future, this is exactly the kind of area that we should be
focusing our attention on, and I would encourage our Majority
to hold many more hearings that follow this example.
I also believe that we should strongly consider developing
a National Quantum Initiative, and I look forward to engaging
with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in the hope
that we can put together bipartisan legislation to make this
happen.
I would note that it will be much more difficult to ensure
U.S. leadership in this crucial field if we don't at least
provide sufficient resources to maintain our current rate of
progress. Yet the Administration is proposing significant cuts
to the agencies and programs that are at the vanguard of this
effort. This would include an 11 percent cut to the National
Science Foundation, a 6.6 percent cut to the quantum science
research at the National Institutes of Standards and
Technology, and a 16 percent cut to the Department of Energy's
Basic Energy Sciences program. I look forward to hearing more
about the impacts of these proposed cuts from both of our
witness panels. Based on their written testimony alone, I
expect that we will hear more than enough justification for
substantially increasing our support for these quantum R&D
efforts over the next several years.
I thank you and yield back.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Johnson follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you.
I will now introduce our first panel of witnesses. Our
first witness today is Dr. Carl Williams, Acting Director of
the Physical Measurement Laboratory at the National Institute
of Standards and Technology. Dr. Williams is a Fellow of the
Joint Quantum Institute and the Joint Center for Quantum
Information in Computer Science, and he is an Adjunct Professor
of Physics at the University of Maryland. He also directs the
Quantum Information Program and helps lead the National
Strategic Computing Initiative at NIST.
Additionally, he's a member and chairs interagency efforts
in support of these activities under the Committee of Science
of the National Science and Technology Council. He received a
Bachelor of Arts in physics from Rice University and a Ph.D.
from the University of Chicago.
Dr. Jim Kurose is our second witness. He's the Assistant
Director of Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Prior to NSF,
he was a Distinguished Professor in the School of Computer
Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
He also currently serves as Co-Chair of the Networking and
Information Technology Research and Development Subcommittee of
the National Science and Technology Council Committee on
Technology, which provides overall coordination for the IT
research and development activities of 18 federal government
agencies and offices. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in physics
from Wesleyan University as well as a Masters of science and a
Ph.D. in computer science from Columbia University.
Dr. Stephen Binkley is our third witness today, and he is
Acting Director of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. In
this role, he provides scientific and management oversight for
the six science programs of the Office of Science including
advanced scientific computing research. Previously, he has held
senior positions at Sandia National Laboratories, the
Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy.
He has conducted research in theoretical chemistry, material
science, computer science, applied mathematics, and
microelectronics. He received a Bachelor of Science in
chemistry from Elizabethtown College as well as a Ph.D. in
chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University.
I now recognize Dr. Williams for five minutes to present
his testimony.
TESTIMONY OF DR. CARL J. WILLIAMS, ACTING DIRECTOR,
PHYSICAL MEASUREMENT LABORATORY,
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY
Dr. Williams. Thank you. Ranking Member Johnson, Chairwoman
Comstock, Chairman Weber, Ranking Member Lipinski, Ranking
Member Veasey, and members of the Subcommittees, I am Dr. Carl
Williams, the Acting Director of the Physical Measurement
Laboratory at the Department of Commerce, National Institute of
Standards and Technology, known as NIST. Thank you for the
opportunity to appear before you today to discuss NIST's role
in quantum science and quantum computing.
As this nation's national metrology institute, NIST
conducts basic and applied research in quantum science to
advance the field of fundamental metrology as part of it's core
mission by developing more precise measurement tools and
technologies to address industry's increasingly challenging
requirements. This work has positioned NIST both as a global
leader among national metrology institutes, and as one of the
world's leading centers of research and engineering.
While NIST's work in quantum science is revolutionizing the
world of metrology, it also has direct application to quantum
communications and quantum computation. Today I'll describe in
detail more of NIST's quantum research efforts and how they are
being leveraged to positively advance the field.
Many nations view leadership in quantum computing as
critical to making significant breakthroughs in medicine,
manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and defense and reaping
the rewards from those investments and breakthroughs. The
United States has long been viewed as a leader in quantum
science, information, and computing. Significant historic
investments by the U.S. government have supported a robust base
of fundamental research and this has led to several
transformational breakthroughs in the field.
Today, U.S. leadership in quantum science and technology is
increasingly dependent on significant investments from U.S.
technology giants and major defense companies with a natural
interest in many commercial applications of quantum technology
beyond computing. These applications include quantum
communications, quantum algorithms and software, data security,
imaging, and quantum sensors, and could be applied to anything
from national security to the Internet of Things to advance
sensors for gas and oil exploration.
While NIST has made significant breakthroughs, the rest of
the world has not been standing still, and U.S. companies are
taking notice. Worldwide interest in investment quantum
computing-related technologies have spiked in recent years,
following important increasingly complex technological
demonstrations by overseas research efforts.
At NIST, our researchers study and harness quantum
mechanical properties of light and matter in some of the most
well-controlled measurement environments to create the world's
most sensitive and precise sensors and atomic clocks. NIST has
been a leader in the field of quantum information from the
beginning and its multiple Nobel prize-winning contributions
have helped move quantum computing and quantum information
scientific fields of study to technological ones.
These breakthroughs in precision timekeeping have critical
real-world applications to navigation and timing. Today,
commercial atomic clocks contained in GPS satellites provide
the timekeeping precision that we take for granted when we use
our GPS devices to pinpoint our location to within a meter of
almost anywhere on Earth. Atomic clocks are just one example of
NIST research focus on measurement science and has applications
to quantum computing.
Superconductors are also used by researchers at NIST to
make ultrasensitive single photon detectors using precision
photonic measurements. These specially designed sensors have
become essential components in experiments at NIST to test the
foundations of quantum mechanics and realize quantum
teleportation. Progress in quantum teleportation is expected to
be essential for eventual commercial quantum computing and for
other forms of quantum information transfer.
NIST's programs on quantum algorithms and postquantum
cryptology further build on our core effort in quantum
information theory with a focus on addressing security
challenges anticipated when practical quantum computers are
realized. NIST, working with industry has played a leading role
since the 1970s in developing cryptographic standards. NIST
researchers are using their understanding of quantum algorithms
to create new classical encryption algorithms, commonly
referred to as post-quantum cryptography, that will be
resistant to quantum computing attacks.
NIST recognizes that it has an essential role to play in
U.S. leadership in quantum computing and information. However,
that role is not to build a quantum computer. NIST's role,
consistent with its mission, is to develop the foundational
knowledge and measurement science support for U.S. leadership
in quantum computing and to ensure that our cybersecurity
infrastructure remains resilient in the quantum era.
NIST is extremely proud of the world-class quantum science,
quantum information, mathematics and computer science programs,
and we appreciate the support of this Committee for NIST's
research efforts. Sustained advancements by NIST in these
fields continue to underpin success in many parts in its
measurement science mission and to contribute to U.S.
leadership in quantum computing.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I would be
happy to answer any questions you may have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Williams follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, and I now recognize Dr.
Kurose for five minutes to present his testimony.
TESTIMONY OF DR. JIM KUROSE, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR,
COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
AND ENGINEERING DIRECTORATE,
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Dr. Kurose. Thank you very much. Good morning, Ranking
Member Johnson, Chairwoman Comstock, Chairman Weber, Ranking
Member Lipinski, and Ranking Member Veasey. My name is Jim
Kurose. I'm the Assistant Director at the National Science
Foundation for Computer and Information Science and
Engineering. As you know, the National Science Foundation
supports fundamental research in all areas of science and
engineering disciplines; supports for education and training
for the next generation of discoverers and innovators, and
contributes to national security and U.S. economic
competitiveness. I welcome this opportunity to highlight the
promise of quantum information science, which I'll call QIS--so
that's a little bit of an acronym alert here--and NSF's
investment in QIS and their impact on our nation's security and
economy.
QIS harnesses quantum phenomena with the promise of
creating more precise measurement systems, more accurate
sensors, more secure communication, and more advanced computers
that will outperform today's most powerful digital
supercomputers on a range of problems in materials science,
molecular simulation, design and optimization, and
cryptography. There will be benefits in nearly all areas and
all sectors of the economy as well as new challenges,
particularly in the area of cybersecurity.
NSF's investments in fundamental long-term research have
been crucial to a national strategy for sustaining leadership
in QIS. For several decades, NSF has funded research that has
defined the frontiers of QIS. NSF's investments in QIS research
span multiple disciplines including mathematical and physical
sciences, engineering, and computer science, and in four areas:
in the fundamentals that advance our understanding of uniquely
quantum phenomena and their interaction with classical systems;
in elements that model, control, and exploit quantum particles
and measure them; in software systems and in algorithms that
enable quantum information processing; and in the workforce
including training a new generation of scientists, engineers,
and educators for a globally competitive workforce.
NSF annually has invested approximately $30 million in QIS
research and education activities plus another $40 million in
facility-related investments. Looking forward, QIS will
continue to be an important part of NSF's research portfolio.
The National Science Foundation recently announced 10 Big
Ideas that form a cutting-edge research agenda. One of these
Big Ideas, the Quantum Leap: Leading the Next Quantum
Revolution, is aimed squarely at advancing QIS. Another Big
Idea, Growing Convergence Research at NSF, seeks the deep
integration of knowledge, techniques and expertise from
multiple fields that are needed to address scientific
challenges in areas including QIS.
NSF's investments in QIS research have been accompanied by
investments in education and workforce development as well.
Academic QIS researchers are also teachers. They take their
latest developments from the lab to the classroom and they
mentor research students and postdocs. For example, Dr. Krysta
Svore was an NSF-funded graduate student at Columbia University
focusing on computational complexity in quantum computing.
Today she's a leader at Microsoft Research developing real-
world quantum algorithms and designing quantum software
architectures. Dr. Svore is emblematic of the unique flow of
ideas and people and artifacts between academia and industry in
our nation. In information technology areas, this flow has been
characterized by the so-called ``tire tracks diagram,'' which
documents in multiple reports from the National Academies the
flow of ideas, people and artifacts back and forth. Indeed, NSF
frequently partners with industry to accelerate programs in
mutual areas of interest, and QIS is one of these areas.
NSF's close coordination and collaboration with other
federal agencies has been critical in shaping its QIS
investments. Together with DOE and NIST, NSF co-chairs the
Interagency Working Group on Quantum Information Science, which
was established in 2009 under the National Science and
Technology Council's Committee on Science. Last year, the QIS
working group released a report, Advancing Quantum Information
Science: National Challenges and Opportunities, which notes the
promise in this area and NSF's key role as an agency in
supporting QIS fundamental research, workforce development, and
technology transfer.
My testimony today has really emphasized the potential of
QIS in a wide range of areas from harnessing unrivaled
computing power to securing communications to developing novel
therapeutics for some of our most vexing diseases. NSF has made
significant long-term investments in fundamental and
multidisciplinary QIS research. These investments have laid the
foundations for QIS as we know it today, and in turn are
enabling U.S. researchers and industry to lead abroad. I've
described how NSF's education portfolio is working to develop a
next-generation QIS-capable workforce.
This concludes my remarks, and I'm very happy to answer
questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Kurose follows:]
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Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, and I now recognize Dr.
Binkley for five minutes.
TESTIMONY OF DR. JOHN STEPHEN BINKLEY,
ACTING DIRECTOR OF SCIENCE,
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Dr. Binkley. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock, Chairmen
Weber, Ranking Member Lipinski, Ranking Member Veasey, and
Members of the Subcommittee. I'm pleased to come before you
today to discuss quantum information science and technology,
the Department of Energy's research efforts and interagency
collaboration in this area, and where the United States stands
relative to international competition.
I am presently the Acting Director of the Office of Science
at the U.S. Department of Energy. Quantum information science,
or QIS, for short, which includes quantum computing, is a
rapidly evolving area of science with great scientific and
technology import, and because it will open new vistas for both
science and technology development and hence new commercial
markets, the U.S. and other countries are increasing
investments in related basic research and technology
development. DOE and other government agencies believe that QIS
will continue to grow in importance in the coming decade and
are planning our investments accordingly.
Current and future QIS applications differ from earlier and
ongoing applications of quantum mechanics such as those that
led to the laser by exploiting distinct quantum behavior that
does not have classical analogs and does not arise in non-
quantum systems such as superposition and entanglement.
Quantum information concepts are providing increasingly
important--or providing increasingly important in advancing
understanding across a surprisingly large range of fundamental
topics in the physical sciences including the search for dark
matter, the emergence of space time, testing of fundamental
symmetries, the black hole information paradox, probing the
interiors of cells in plants and animals, and possibly even
photosynthesis.
Furthermore, a wide range of applications of QIS are being
explored including in sensing and metrology, communication,
simulation, and computing. With these motivations, recent QIS
advances have been rapid and international, and industry
attention and investments have been growing. QIS clearly
represents an emerging field with crosscutting importance
across DOE Office of Science program offices. DOE is uniquely
positioned to cover a wide range of QIS activities with
expertise and capabilities in frontier computing, quantum
materials, quantum information, control systems, production and
use of isotopes, cryogenics and so on spanning the National
Laboratory system and multiple program offices within the
Office of Science.
At the federal level, quantum information science has been
a topic of interest to federal agencies for some time including
NIST, the National Science Foundation, and DOE, which are
working closely together and has garnered greater attention in
the past few years due to a confluence of events, namely
theoretical and technological progress in the field, the
slowing of an apparently rapidly approaching end to Moore's
Law, advancement in semiconductor technology and aggressive
investments by other nations.
DOE's National Laboratories have unique attributes that are
complementary to those of other agencies and could address gaps
identified in the national ecosystem for quantum information
science and technology. The Department of Energy labs are well
equipped to address challenging problems in fundamental
research that requires sustained efforts or are too large in
scope for university research groups. DOE labs additionally
stand out in their ability to fabricate and characterize novel
materials and devices, their expertise in using high-
performance computing resources, and their diverse range of
high-caliber scientists and engineers that can form the basis
of interdisciplinary teams, which are the type that are needed
to solve QIS problems.
Worldwide interest in QIS and related technology has
increased substantially in the past five years. While the
United States remains the leader in the field, other nations
have made significant new investments and have developed long-
term strategies that already have shifted geographical
distribution of some top-tier research groups. The largest
quantum information science and technology programs outside the
United States are in China, the European Union, and the United
Kingdom, and those countries are planning ambitious
investments.
I would like to thank you for the opportunity to come
before you today to discuss the importance of QIS and the
Department of Energy's efforts in this area. I look forward to
discussing this topic with you and answering your questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Binkley follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, and I now recognize myself
for five minutes of questions, and this is definitely an
intimidating topic. Thank you for your testimony.
Now, Dr. Kurose, conversations around STEM education are
often closely tied to demand for certain jobs, and without
knowing the exact workforce needs surrounding quantum just yet,
how do we prepare for such a workforce, and how can young
people be directed? If they're interested in this, what should
they be doing now?
Dr. Kurose. Thank you very much for the question, and it's
really great. And maybe let me highlight education and
educational opportunities at different levels, and I'll start
at the graduate level because I mentioned that in my testimony.
Remember that the generation of researchers who are going to
push us forward in QIS, they're in labs now and they're
graduate students and they're postdocs working in those labs
now. Those researchers will then be taking their education out
and spreading it and using it in industry, for example. At the
undergraduate level, we're seeing courses now in quantum. We're
seeing seminar courses there. So I think at the undergraduate
level, we're beginning to see the educational opportunities
appear.
When we think about the workforce more broadly, I think we
really need to think about the STEM pipeline and address issues
in K-12. I would say there are focus areas in particular, the
notion of computational thinking that the National Science
Foundation and other agencies have led in terms of computer
science for all and computer science principles. Access to a
rigorous and engaging computer science education at the high
school level will really help prepare the students in middle
schools and in high schools for engaging in computer science
and in STEM more broadly, I think, at the college level.
Maybe one other area that I might like to highlight is that
when you look at the people that you've invited here to testify
that you'll see you have engineers, you have computer
scientists, you have physicists, and it's really going to take
participation from across all of the STEM disciplines to make
QIS really happen. And so it's important broadly across STEM
that we train the next generation of researchers.
Yes, my area is computer science so I think it's incredibly
important but this is an area that all of STEM--engineering,
mathematics, physical sciences, chemistry, computer science--
are going to have to be involved.
Chairwoman Comstock. And then how would a national quantum
initiative meet the challenge to attract and retain U.S. talent
in this field given the significant challenges for all of you.
Any of you who'd like to answer on that?
Dr. Williams. So should Congress and the Executive Branch
decide to have a quantum initiative in this area, we'd be happy
to work with you to help address some of the impediments that
were listed in the 2016 document, and to foster that broader
ecosystem that's going to be necessary to translate this from
academia and the National Labs into our industrial base because
it is that translation into the industrial base that is key.
Dr. Kurose. I might add that I think our collective sense
is that we're at an inflection point with QIS. For many years--
and the investments by our agencies go back many, many years
that everybody knew quantum was going to be something very,
very important, and we were doing the foundational work. I
think especially if you look at industry, you look at what's
happening in the laboratories in academia across the United
States, there's a sense that things have manifestly changed in
the last couple of years and now we're seeing programmable
computers. Chris Monroe from the University of Maryland will be
one of the witnesses in the next panel. You have IBM. Both of
them have made general purpose or programming capabilities
available on real quantum hardware at this point. I think that
was the dream five years ago. We're realizing that reality now.
It's going to be a while until we get enough qubits and we can
do meaningful computations at scale but we're seeing this now
in the real world. We're seeing on hands-on abilities to
actually experiment with these systems.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. I appreciated that.
And I will now yield to the Ranking Member, Mr. Lipinski,
for his questions.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. I want to continue on a bit with
the Chairwoman's questions but I'll just start out by talking
about something that's already been brought up about China
launching the quantum-enabled satellite transmittal to secure
data, the 1,200-mile quantum communications link between
Shanghai and Beijing. China has also recently announced a $10
billion quantum computing center. Europe is also heavily
investing in quantum information science as are other nations.
So the question is, where do we go and what do we need to
do from here? Unfortunately, the Trump Administration budget
proposed an 11 percent cut to NIST, a 6.6 percent cut to
quantum information science--actually an 11 percent cut to NSF,
6.6 percent cut to quantum information science at NIST, and 16
percent cut to DOE's Basic Energy Sciences program where Dr.
Binkley just testified that much of quantum research is
supported. So obviously these cuts would presumably be harmful.
What do we need to do? What would you recommend that we do?
Obviously the federal government is not going to, you know,
spend--go to any length, spend any amount of money, but we
certainly need to do something. The idea of having a quantum
initiative I think is a great idea. I'm very hopeful that we'll
be working on that. We have a National Nanotechnology
Initiative. I think a quantum initiative would be great to
have, as I think the Chairwoman was talking about, but what do
you think that we need to do from the federal government level?
Obviously it's not just the federal government involved.
There's also the private sector. But what would you like to see
happen? How much of an investment do we have to make so that
the United States does not really fall behind and miss this? So
let's start with Dr. Williams. Any ideas that you would have,
what you would suggest?
Dr. Williams. So I think in winning this game that it is
not just what the role of the U.S. government, it's also the
commitments by American industry. We need to all work together,
and moreover, we need to transition the knowledge base that is
currently largely in academia and universities and a few small
research environments in industry to where more industry is
aware. Because, again, if you look at the broader making up of
something like an iPhone or anything else so we can talk about
the qPhone in the future, there are many manufacturers that
have to come in, and so arranging for all those OEM companies
to be engaged, make them aware, to bring them to the table, and
so a lot of the impediments that are talked about in the 2016
documents, which is multidisciplinary in nature, must be
addressed but we also must address pulling the technology out
until there is a real pull from industry because at the moment
it's a push because they don't see how to make a profit in this
area.
Mr. Lipinski. Dr. Kurose?
Dr. Kurose. Well, actually I'd like to second Dr. Williams'
comments. If you look at industry and you see, you know, over
the last year where Google and Microsoft and IBM and Intel have
been doing, it's clear there's really--when we talked about an
inflection point earlier, there's very much increased interest
in academia. And you'd mentioned the word partnership so I
think partnerships with industry are going to be very
important. I mentioned the tire tracks diagram in the
information technology area. We have a long history of
establishing partnerships between academic institutions with
industry and government in a triangle, if you will. At the
National Science Foundation, for example, we've done
partnerships with Intel, with Semiconductor Research
Corporation, with VMware on joint solicitations. This is basic
fundamental research, because that's still what's needed now,
basic fundamental research, but industry can bring a lot to the
table. Other aspects of partnership, again to echo what Dr.
Williams was saying, is partnerships among disciplines, you
know, bringing together the physicists, the engineers, the
computer scientists, we would say up the technology stack, if
you will, from the qubits all the way at the very bottom all
the way up to the programming at the top. And then again,
partnerships among agencies, which I believe all three of us
have already talked about.
Mr. Lipinski. Dr. Binkley?
Dr. Binkley. Just very briefly, the one point that I would
add to what my counterparts have suggested is if you look
historically, one of the greatest strengths of U.S. science
programs has been the emphasis on basic science, and by
contrast, if one looks at the efforts that are being put
forward both in the European Union and the United Kingdom, they
have a very strong technology focus, and I think that we should
not lose sight of the fact that much of the innovation that is
necessary for making rapid progress in this area does actually
come out of the basic science, and so continued investments in
the basic science is, I think, at this point very important to
sustain.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. I now recognize Mr. Weber for five
minutes.
Mr. Weber. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Doctor--well, first of all, let me do it this way. Dr.
Williams, how long have you been involved in the quantum field?
Dr. Williams. So formally, NIST has had a program since the
year 2000, and I've been engaged in there. I was at the first
workshop that I think was solely focused on QIS back in 1994
that was held at NIST shortly after Peter Shore came up with
his algorithm.
Mr. Weber. Okay. Dr. Kurose?
Dr. Kurose. Well, I have an undergraduate degree in physics
and learned quantum mechanics as an undergraduate but my
involvement with QIS research began when I came to the National
Science Foundation three years ago.
Mr. Weber. So that's 2014.
Dr. Binkley?
Dr. Binkley. I did my Ph.D. work in quantum chemistry and
got my Ph.D. in 1976, and I've been involved in quantum theory
and quantum-related work ever since.
Mr. Weber. Good gracious. Okay. You should be a quantum
leap ahead of everybody else.
Dr. Binkley. Sir, I'm afraid it's a terribly difficult
subject.
Mr. Weber. I understand.
Dr. Kurose, your written testimony touches on the
differences between classical computing like the exascale
computing systems we've heard so much about in this Committee,
and quantum computing. Explain the difference for us as briefly
as you can.
Dr. Kurose. Okay. Well, in traditional supercomputers, for
example, information is stored in bits, ones and zeros, and we
operate on those bits, so we perform operations and all kinds
of transformations. That's the way computing technology has
been done since its invention 70 years ago. Cubits, as my
colleagues with Ph.D.'s in physics can tell you better than I
can, are a very different piece. They don't exist in the one-
zero state; they exist in a superposition of states, and from a
computing standpoint, that allows one to rather than compute
deterministically over ones and zeros to deal with probability
distributions of how the states of the qubits are in the
entanglement, the interrelationship between these qubits. It's
a fundamentally different way of thinking about computation and
moving from ones and zeros to these qubits.
Mr. Weber. Okay, to an identifiable state, either one or
zero, and now to a single particle that has the ability to do
both?
Dr. Kurose. Right, and I would say in the end, you need an
answer that has ones and zeros and so there is going to be a
very important coupling between the digital systems that
control and program these quantum computers and the quantum
technology that's lying at the base underneath.
Mr. Weber. So very quickly then, what you're saying then is
that these two systems will interact. Because you just said in
the end, you need the ones and the zeros, the binary code.
Dr. Kurose. That's right. So traditional computing will
play a very important role in terms of the programming and the
control of the quantum computing. I'd mentioned earlier the
fact that you can now program quantum computers using the
digital programming to sort of wrap around the quantum.
Mr. Weber. So we're going to hear about that in the next
panel.
Dr. Kurose. I think you'll hear about that in the next
panel.
Mr. Weber. Dr. Binkley, for you, we spent a lot of time on
this Committee discussing high-performance computing,
particularly DOE's goal to create an exascale computing system
by 2021. How does the push to study quantum information systems
fit in with that goal?
Dr. Binkley. At the Department of Energy, we see quantum
computing as something that follows the efforts that we're
doing in exascale computing. There are classes of physical
problems that are characterized by the Schrodinger equation,
which is the basis of all quantum mechanics. For example, most
of the materials in chemical sciences fall into that category.
Today we do calculations of an approximate nature on digital
computers for the purpose of furthering our knowledge in those
areas. Quantum computers will enable us to do much, much better
calculations, exact calculations, as it were, when they finally
become available. However, there will still remain applications
in high-performance computing that are not quantum in nature.
Mr. Weber. Back to the ones and zeros you talked about.
Dr. Binkley. Exactly, the ones and zeros, and those
calculations, for example, structural calculations of materials
looking at doing engineering types of calculations, looking at
nuclear fission reactors, looking at heat flow and things like
that, will still remain inherently digital. And so there will
be a continuing need for simulations of that class.
Mr. Weber. So you foresee a parallel path, quite frankly?
Dr. Binkley. Yes, sir. We see the two different
technologies as being very complementary in the future.
Mr. Weber. Madam Chair, can I indulge for about another two
or three hours? This stuff is fascinating.
I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. And I now recognize Mr. Veasey for
five minutes.
Mr. Veasey. Thank you, Madam Chair.
I wanted to just kind of piggyback a little bit on Mr.
Lipinski's questions earlier revolving around international
competition. We know that obviously whatever country is able to
capitalize on this, the gains are going to be huge, and I
wanted you to expand a little bit more about the cuts. As it
was mentioned earlier I believe in my comments that the Trump
Administration's budget proposal cuts include 11 percent to
NSF, about a 6.6 percent cut to quantum information science at
NIST, and a 16 percent cut at DOE, and I wanted to know if all
of you could expand more on the impact of the cuts, because I
think that that is important, particularly again as it relates
to competition.
Dr. Williams. So at NIST, we always maximize resources that
are provided to us by the Committee, and when we go in to
optimize our portfolio, we always work to ensure that whatever
decisions that are made by Congress and the Executive Branch
that we implement them in a manner that provides the best
return to the nation.
Dr. Kurose. So I'd like to simply say that among the
agencies that you see here, and other agencies that we have
been investing in QIS. We've provided the scientific foundation
that we see today. I think again, because we're seeing an
inflection point, now is the time, a very opportune time, to
accelerate those investments and to accelerate our progress
forwards. And you know, I will mention that funding, academic
funding in computer science and physics and engineering, is
very competitive and we go through a merit review process. If
you look at the outcomes of the merit review process we leave
lots of good ideas, really great ideas, on the cutting-room
floor because we have a budget, we work within those budget
constraints, and we maximize the investments that we can make,
but there are lots of good ideas that we're not able to fund
and that go through the merit review process with very high
scores.
And so again, I think especially in an area like QIS where
we're at a change point that additional investments simply
allow accelerating progress in a very important area.
Dr. Binkley. At the Department of Energy in our fiscal year
2018 budget, we obviously had some very difficult decisions to
make, and even in light of the significant reductions that
were, you know, put forward by the Administration, we did
manage to increase funding for QIS. Our budget request
contained essentially a $40 million increase in QIS-related
funding, and that came about through a long process of planning
and thoughtful attention looking at the opportunities in the
area, and also what we perceive to be the strategic importance
of the area.
Now, obviously, you know, that impacted other activities in
the Office of Science portfolio but nevertheless, the judgment
of our senior leadership team was that this is an area that, as
Dr. Kurose has mentioned, has reached an inflection point and
it's timely to really increase investments in this area.
Mr. Veasey. Dr. Kurose, you talked a little bit about the
importance of accelerating the funding. As it relates to
competition with other countries, how important is accelerating
the funds, accelerating the resources that we need in order to
keep that competitive edge here in the United States?
Dr. Kurose. Well, I think it's important to be accelerating
both in the basic science, which I think Dr. Binkley mentioned,
and also in the technology. Several members have mentioned
China's advances in the quantum satellite communication. In a
sense, that was something that folks foresaw as happening.
Scott Aaronson, who's a physicist at the University of Texas in
Austin, and worksin quantum said this was not unexpected but
the real significance of this news, he says, is not that it was
unexpected or that it overturns anything previously believed
but that simply it's the satisfying culmination of years of
hard work. So we need to push forward on the basic science
frontiers but there's also now pushing forward on the
technology and the implementation sides as well.
Mr. Veasey. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I yield back
the balance of my time.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you.
And I now recognize Mr. Webster for five minutes.
Mr. Webster. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Dr. Williams, there's a lot of talk about how much money
we're going to have and what we need it for and so forth. Would
you say that even if we were able to maintain or even
accelerate the funding, if there was something else that came
in and siphoned away some of that money, would that be
detrimental to the study of quantum and our success in that?
Would you see that being detrimental, anything that would
siphon away money?
Dr. Williams. I think as one moves--again, there's a lot of
basic research but as one moves to transitioning this
technology into our broader base, whether for national security
or for economic security, that if we do not exploit the seed
corn that we have created, that other nations will exploit it
for us and they will end up reaping the economic benefit of it.
So I think that the United States somehow has to figure out how
we end up owning this technology the same way that we own the
technology for the transistor and all the benefits that came
from that.
I and Dr. Binkley were at the EU kickoff, and one of the
small European companies basically pointed out the transitor
was also found there in Europe and they thought it was a toy.
We exploited it, and we reaped the benefits of that. So I think
we're going to have to reap the benefits of the corn that we
have sowed.
Mr. Webster. And it would be more than economic. You
mentioned economic benefits. I mean, there are more benefits
than just that, isn't there?
Dr. Williams. Yes, absolutely. The national security
implications because again, sensors are used in our military.
They're not only used in the military but they're used for
mining and other things. So I mean, there are broad economic
and national security implications to QIS technology.
Mr. Webster. Dr. Kurose, do you have anything to add to
that?
Dr. Kurose. Well, I was just standing--sitting here shaking
my head yes, yes, yes. So I agree with what Dr. Williams said.
With respect to national security, Chairwoman Comstock
mentioned in her opening remarks the importance of quantum--in
terms of quantum encryption and postquantum encryption and the
powerful nature of quantum computing. It's one area where
quantum computing, is not a panacea for all kinds of computing
but one area where it's going to be very, very important is in
cryptography. It's one of the things that can be done really
well there, and that has tremendous ramifications for national
security and also for economic competitiveness.
Mr. Webster. Dr. Binkley?
Dr. Binkley. Following up on the theme introduced by Dr.
Williams, if you look around, digital electronics pervades
everything that we do today, and the quantum technologies that
are coming about through research in QIS are likely to have a
similar effect as we move into the future, and you know, we are
in fact at an inflection point and the time really to invest is
now.
Mr. Webster. Madam Chair, I would say that in this
Committee we've had people come and testify about taking away
some of the money and adding it in to another program, but I
would say that the testimony here would be a direct assault on
that in that having money diverted into some other program by
us would be detrimental to our advancement. I mean, there is an
imperative. We're not in sort of just a walk. We're in a run, a
race. We're trying to be number one. And so I know a lot of
people have bought into the fact that STEAM should replace
STEM, and all I can tell you is that to me says some of the
money gets diverted, and I think that would be a bad thing.
There's nothing wrong with the arts and other things, I think
those are great, but we're in a race, and if we're going to win
this particular race, this race that we're in now, we're going
to have to take all of our resources for that particular race
and put them there. So long live STEAM, I'm glad for it, but on
the other hand, if we want to win this race, we're going to
have to focus on STEM. I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, and I now recognize Ms.
Bonamici for five minutes.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Before I begin, I want to recognize a member of the
audience, Physics Professor Michael Raymer, a University of
Oregon professor, Dr. Raymer received tenure on the faculty at
the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester and he
moved to the University of Oregon, my alma mater, in 1988 and
served as the Founding Director of the Oregon Center for
Optics, now the Center for Optical Molecular and Quantum
Science. Dr. Raymer, thank you for joining us today.
I want to start by joining the comments that many have made
about the concerns about budget cuts. I also wanted to thank
Chair Comstock for mentioning the importance of leadership, and
we're all talking about the 2016 report that was done of course
with the leadership of Dr. Holdren and others in the White
House Office of Science and Technology. OSTP has now been
vacant at the top position for the longest time since it was
established in 1976 with a fraction of its staff that was there
at the time of the 2016 report. So I want to point that out,
that that's critical to have that leadership and that position.
I also want to respond to my colleague's comments about
STEAM. As the founder and co-chair of the bipartisan
Congressional STEAM Caucus, I don't want to use too much of my
time but just to emphasize that STEAM does not divert funding.
It enhances STEM education by making sure that there's
creativity and innovation in the educational process, and just
as a point, the Nobel laureates in sciences are much more
likely to be engaged in arts and crafts in their spare time.
STEAM enhances STEM learning. It does not take away from the
funding. What's taking away from the funding is the budget cuts
that are proposed by the Administration.
I also wanted to follow up on the point that Chair Comstock
made about education and workforce and the gaps in that, and I
know the panel has addressed that, but it was an important
topic in the 2016 report. One of the things that as a member of
the Education Committee, I want to emphasize is the importance
of college affordability and accessibility because a lot of the
workforce that we could rely on to solve some of these problems
and to be leaders in this area are finding challenges with not
only college affordability but many of them may be DC.
recipients, so immigration reform and college affordability are
also important to solving these issues because we know that
there are gaps.
So I'm going to ask all the panelists how should quantum
computing change the way we think about and plan for
cybersecurity? It's something that we talk about a lot here in
this Committee and in Congress. Will we have--right now we have
quantum encryption in place for existing communications and
financial networks before quantum computers upend our current
system of public key encryption? In other words, do you expect
that quantum computers will create hack-proof replacements? Can
you address that? And I'll ask each of the panelists, and then
I do have another question as well.
Dr. Williams. So at NIST, we've already embarked on the
path of trying to find algorithms that we can replace our
current public key infrastructure with that will be quantum
resistant. This is being taken seriously because we know that
it is essential to have it, so we believe that it will happen.
With regard to the broader cyber theme, there are other
ways that this technology helps. Again, very good clock and
good timing can actually increase the robustness of our
networks, like with almost all kind of technologies that are
both quantum takes and it gives, and it's about learning to
understand how we can use the technology to make our systems
more robust as well as providing quantum-resistant algorithms
to replace current public key infrastructure.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you.
Dr. Kurose or Dr. Binkley, do you want to add to that on
the cybersecurity issue?
Dr. Kurose. I would just say that the challenge of
postquantum encryption is a very active research area now, and
there are a lot of space methods that some of the community are
coalescing around, but I think you ask, is there a guarantee
right now that they're going to be resistant? I don't think the
answer to that is actually known yet, and that's a very active
research area.
Ms. Bonamici. Dr. Binkley?
Dr. Binkley. At the Department of Energy, we're not
involved in any cryptologic or cryptanalysis type of research
so it's not really our lane. But we are very interested in
what's going to happen with quantum networking. There are
definite possibilities in the future where quantum networking
will have impacts on science-type activities. We do operate the
largest high-capacity network for science in the nation today,
and we are very interested in how that will evolve in the
future in light of quantum technologies.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you. And briefly, many of you mentioned
the importance of the private investment in research, and Dr.
Williams, you even said we're increasingly dependent on
significant investments from U.S. technology giants and major
defense companies, but do you all agree that robust federal
investment in fundamental and basic research is critical to the
development in the private sector as well??
Dr. Williams. Yes.
Ms. Bonamici. Dr. Kurose?
Dr. Kurose. I think yes, and I think also if you were to go
to those technology giants and say is that important, they
would also all say yes.
Ms. Bonamici. Do you agree, Dr. Binkley?
Dr. Binkley. Yes, and I think also active partnerships
between government research organizations like NSF, NIST and
DOE with their counterpart--counterparts in the commercial
sector are really important. That's actually proven very
successful in the exascale program over the last seven years.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you, Madam Chair. I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, and I now recognize Mr.
Hultgren for five minutes.
Mr. Hultgren. Thank you, Chairwoman. Thank you all for
being here. I appreciate your work, and appreciate you spending
time with us today.
Dr. Binkley, I wonder if I could address my first question
to you. I wonder if you could talk briefly about the work
across the Department that's being done in quantum space, not
just in ASCR. I know Fermilab, which is in my area, is involved
in things like the Chicago Quantum Exchange as well as IMQ Net
with AT&T, Cal Tech and the exchange to establish the first
nodes of a quantum internet. Can you talk about the impact this
work will have throughout our scientific ecosystem and how are
the different programs like HEP and the Office of Science
working to make sure that this happens?
Dr. Binkley. So we're viewing quantum in the broad sense
within the Office of Science. We do think of it as quantum
information science, which does contain some aspects--which
does contain quantum computing. So I'm not going to spend a lot
of time dwelling on the ACSR aspects of it, but we do see very,
very strong programs already in existence and that need to
evolve into stronger programs in the basic energy sciences area
that are aimed at quantum materials that could be used in
fabricating new types of qubits, for example. We also see the
potential for quantum-based technologies for sensors and
detectors that could be used in high-energy-physics
experiments. It's possible to use concepts like quantum
squeezing to improve the sensitivity of certain types of
detectors. All of these are very active areas of research right
now within the entire breadth of Office of Science programs.
Quantum networking, which I mentioned a moment ago, is
something also that I think deserves attention. In summary,
within the Office of Science we see opportunities across at
least five of our six programs for quantum science and quantum
technologies to make impacts on the physical sciences. Again,
our emphasis is really on the physical sciences here.
Mr. Hultgren. Thanks.
Dr. Kurose, I wonder if I could address to you, I
understand that for QIS, the system of algorithms and standards
would need to be rebuilt from scratch. I wonder if you could
give us an idea of how large an undertaking this is. Is it fair
to say this area of research cannot be helped along by
classical computing methods or do investments in exascale
computing support quantum computing in any way?
Dr. Kurose. Well, first let me address the question
specifically with respect to cybersecurity because there the
real challenge is that quantum computers will be able to do the
kind of factoring of large numbers into prime numbers which are
sort of at the key of the RSA encryption algorithms that Member
Lipinski was talking about in his remarks. So from a security
standpoint, it's the capabilities of a quantum computer to do
something that a digital computer cannot do in any reasonable
amount of time, which is the real challenge there, and that's
why new cryptographic algorithms, the postquantum algorithms
that are resistant to having quantum computing, that's why
there's so much focus on that right now.
With respect to exascale, one thing maybe I'd like to
emphasize is that quantum again won't be a panacea, won't solve
all problems in computation, and as Dr. Binkley has pointed
out, there are problems that are not well suited to quantum
solutions and there we're going to need supercomputers, we're
going to need exascale for the kinds of national
competitiveness and to push forward science and engineering
research. So it's not an either/or, but an and; and both
absolutely need to progress.
Mr. Hultgren. Great. Thank you. I wonder in my last minute
here, Dr. Binkley and Dr. Kurose, what will DOE and NSF need to
do to prepare the next generation of researchers and
programmers to be able to work with quantum machines? Our
coding now, as I understand it, is still based on the original
linear models from which we started out with punch cards. How
long will it take to maximize the effectiveness of these
machines and make sure that people are ready to maximize?
Dr. Binkley. So I think the way to start that process is to
begin to develop and deploy testbed computers, which is one of
the things that we and NSF have talked about doing. It's become
clear in our advisory panels and other advice bodies that we
use that getting to where researchers have hands-on access to
actual workable systems, even if they're very small, is what's
necessary to allow people to begin to formulate ideas that then
can lead to algorithms and computational methods.
If you look back at the history of computing, when digital
computers first came out in the late 1940s, early 1950s, they
were very, very limited in capability, especially compared to
today's computers, and yet having them in the hands of the
research community is one of the key factors in accelerating
the adaptation of that technology and the development of
algorithms and methods.
Mr. Hultgren. My time's expired. We may follow up, if
that's all right, in writing, if that's okay? I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. I now recognize Mr. McNerney for five
minutes.
Mr. McNerney. Well, I thank the Chair and I thank the
witnesses this morning.
It sounds to me like QIS is a fairly broad subject, and
quantum computing is one small part of that. Now, one of the
things about some of these physics challenges is that there's
areas that seem like they're going to be solved in 15 years and
it's always going to be 15 years. Is quantum computing one of
those areas that we're going to be struggling with 15 years
from now with the same sort of vast misunderstanding or not
understanding that we do today? Dr. Kurose?
Dr. Kurose. Well, if you'd asked me that question five
years or ago or maybe even three years ago, I might have said
yeah, that could be the case, but I think now that you see
smaller-scale quantum computing being available, In the next
panel you'll have Chris Monroe. Who has a computer--a quantum
computing device at the University of Maryland. You'll have
IBM, who's put their quantum computing device online. It's
becoming real. It's not becoming real yet at the scale of the
number of qubits and the size of the computation that could
pose a threat to cracking RSA, for example, but we've made a
real quantum leap, if you will, from five years ago, to today,
to actually having these devices and making these devices
available to folks.
Mr. McNerney. So we're going to be seeing application of
QIS all over the place, it sounds like. What are some of the
inherent scientific and technical challenges that we're going
to be seeing or that we're going to have to overcome. Dr.
Williams?
Dr. Williams. So I think there are a number of challenges.
I mean, again, it's speaking back toward NIST mission. Small
processors can allow us to build several kinds of devices that
would--including extremely low-noise amplifiers and other
things that could provide signal in places where you can get no
signal because we know how we can play around in the
amplification world in the quantum level to do things you
cannot do classically. So I think this technology is going to
really remake a lot of our modern electronics type thing so
when you think about computers, I mean, computers are not just
sitting on your laptop. They're in every game, in every toy and
almost everything that's in your house. The technological
challenges of isolating them are hard and yet we know with
Nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamonds, for example, that we can
maintain coherence in a quantum system at room temperature. We
are learning tremendous amounts of new things about where this
technology is going, and I think this is one of those areas
where the future, probably the most important discoveries, the
most important things that will come out of this QIS revolution
are yet unknown.
Mr. McNerney. Well, one of the things that we should be
worried about is the implications on national security and
national economy. So are we making the kind of investments that
are necessary to keep control of those two issues as opposed to
all of a sudden finding ourselves behind the eight ball?
Dr. Williams. I believe that we are at that inflection
point where it is essential that we figure out how we convert
this basic science into the technology because it's the
technology that basically produces the broad economy that we
tax and pays for science. So we need to ensure that we own the
space, and in a ``flat world,'' this is a far more difficult
game than it was at the end of World War II where we won the
advantages of the transistor and so now we must compete
globally with other nations to exploit the science and turn it
into technology.
Mr. McNerney. Is it going to be more of a cooperative
international effort or a competitive international effort, Dr.
Binkley?
Dr. Binkley. I think it's actually going to be a
combination of both. I mean, there are certain areas where the
relationship between our researchers and their counterparts in
foreign countries is very collegial and very collaborative but
there are also areas where it's very competitive, and in the
areas related to quantum science and technology, I think we're
going to see a more competitive nature when it comes to
international dealings because of the economic forces that will
come to bear through the technologies that are ultimately
developed.
That said, I think there still be impacts in areas like
high-energy physics and nuclear physics where quantum detector
technologies will accelerate the pace of science and there
it'll be more collegial and collaborative.
Mr. McNerney. Thank you. I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. I now recognize Mr. Rohrabacher for
five minutes.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Madam Chairman, thank you very much for
your leadership in calling this hearing today and organizing
it. We appreciate that.
Let me just note that when I got here years ago, 30 years
ago now, there was a big debate as to whether or not we should
put $600 million into the development of picture tubes, and we
were falling behind. Come to find out, of course, of that $600
million, a significant portion of that would be used in
developing analog picture tubes at a time when digital
technology was sweeping into that industry. So not all the
times when you spend money and you're saying it's for a
specific end are you achieving the goal that you want to
achieve. In fact, sometimes cuts force people to make priority
decisions, for example, not putting money into analog old
technology rather than into digital technology. And if you
never terminate the least effective research that you're doing,
you will drag down the most productive research that you're
doing. So the fact that there have been responsible cuts to
various programs is something that will actually, I think, make
our scientific community more effective rather than less
effective.
And when it comes down to this issue, let me just note this
has been a terrific hearing. I want to thank the witnesses. I
have a better understanding now of the challenge that we face.
It sounds like to me, and let me get the pronunciation of Jim
Kurose?
Dr. Kurose. Kurose.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Kurose. You noted that we were actually
ahead in the basic science and we are ahead in that but what it
sounds like to me, Madam Chairman, is that we are not really
making the transition from the basic science into applied
science in a way that America will remain a leader in this
effort. Is there something that we can do? Now, applied science
is just another word, I guess, for applied for defense, et
cetera, but also commercialization is part of what we talk
about in terms of applied science. When we didn't have the
money for NASA to spend all the money we needed for various
space transportation systems, we turned to the private sector
and now we have--with the commercial legislation that we
passed, we have a very vibrant and important investment in
space transportation coming out of our private sector.
Now, is there something that we can do? I mean, okay, I'm
the author of the Commercial Space Act so I'm bragging about
that, but is there something we can do to make the applied go
from the basic to the applied and incentivize the private
sector to invest money in the applied scientific approach to
this issue, Dr. Kurose?
Dr. Kurose. Well, thank you for the question, and in my
earlier remarks I actually talked about partnerships between
industry and the National Science Foundation and the research
community, and so really what you're talking about is use-
inspired research, and I think one of the advantages of having
that collaboration between industry, academia and the federal
government is that we are able to bring in use-inspired
research challenges into the research. That's not a replacement
for fundamental research but it is important.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Well, it's utilizing fundamental research.
Dr. Kurose. It's utilizing fundamental research. Actually,
new research problems can be suggested by the use and by the
development.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Well, I would hope that we can come up
with some specific ideas how to encourage these private sector
companies, which will utilize the information to actually
invest in that transition between basic and utilization.
Do any other witnesses have any thoughts on that?
Dr. Williams. So I agree with Dr. Kurose. Partnerships are
important. Other things that can help are things like other
transaction authority that would allow us to better interact
between academia, industry and the private sector and the
government because there are a lot of restrictions around the
IP that creates problems, and OTA will give us some flexibility
there.
Mr. Rohrabacher. How about the DOE? Does it have some ideas
on that?
Dr. Binkley. Well, I come back to the general concept that
Dr. Kurose mentioned and also Dr. Williams in that effective
partnerships between government research organizations and
private companies are a very good way to go.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Well, we've got to make it profitable for
people to do that.
Dr. Binkley. Correct. But that has succeeded in several
areas in Office of Science programs, and it serves to bring
together researchers from essentially the commercial
environment and the government-funded side, and often it's
beneficial enough to the company that they put their own
resources into that as well. So I think that's one of the most
effective ways of accelerating the transition of basic science
into commercial applications.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Thank you very much, and thank you, Madam
Chairman.
Chairwoman Comstock. I now recognize Mr. Tonko for five
minutes.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to all our
witnesses.
Quantum technology is an exciting frontier, and I'm proud
of the advances happening in my home State of New York and at
universities in my region throughout the capital district. I
continue to hear from universities that want to partner with
other universities and industry and federal endeavors in
quantum technology. I hope that we continue to look toward the
future and foster opportunities for universities and industry
to grow this critical field. It obviously begins with basic
research and so I am concerned that the 2018 budget proposed by
President Trump includes an 11 percent cut, as we heard
earlier, to NSF, a 6.6 percent cut to quantum information
science at NIST, and a 16 percent cut to DOE's Basic Energy
Sciences program where Dr. Binkley just testified much of their
quantum research is supported. So it's got to set a tone. I
believe government sets a tone and provides for basic research
and then hopefully move forward, and in light of the
international scale and what is happening, it's very
problematic to see these proposals coming from our President.
The National Science and Technology Council Interagency
Working Group on Quantum Information Science has done crucial
initial work to scope and prioritize the research in various
efforts. Can any of you provide an update on the Interagency
Working Group?
Dr. Williams. The Interagency Working Group's charter has
been extended and continues to meet. In fact, I believe we have
a meeting on Thursday this week. That group is trying to come
up with a playbook of possible paths forward given different
scenarios. I think we see ourselves as very collaborative
across the whole of government. We've been working close
together for years. We all see that this is vital to our
mission space. This includes not only the agencies sitting at
the table but many of the agencies that are part of the DOD and
the intelligence community as well.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you. All three of your agencies fund
research into quantum materials as a fundamental underpinning
for a quantum technology revolution. Can you describe in lay
terms what quantum materials are and the different aspects of
quantum materials research that each of your agencies is
supporting? Dr. Williams?
Dr. Williams. So quantum materials are materials that have
specific properties. In some cases, because they are 1 or 2D
materials and the various special kinds of films, and in some
cases it's because they have specific properties. So some of
these are superconducting materials. Some of them are ultrapure
silicon so that we can get rid of the nuclear spins that come,
isotopically pure silicon so silicon has three isotopes, and
those nuclear spins cause problems in quantum computing. So we
basically invest in a broad range of different materials that
are necessary to support this technology, to create sensors and
single proton detectors that have both the properties that they
can sense a single photon, reset themselves, and have very high
quantum efficiency, which means again putting different types
of materials stacked on top of them. So there's a lot of
different types of processing going on to do these things so
it's a very broad field.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you.
Dr. Kurose?
Dr. Kurose. I would just add that at the National Science
Foundation, we don't fund any intramural research; we fund
academic research across the United States in many different
areas, so 94 percent of the funding that comes to the National
Science Foundation goes out to researchers in academia. How
funding is allocated to make the hard decisions that Member
Rohrabacher mentioned, that's done through merit review, so the
scientists come in and provide advice to the National Science
Foundation about what the most promising research activities
are among the----
Mr. Tonko. So it seems like a very critical area of federal
investment.
And Dr. Binkley, please?
Dr. Binkley. So following Dr. Kurose's remarks, the
Department of Energy research activities are funded in both
universities and in DOE National Laboratories and again through
a very rigorous peer review process. In our materials area,
we're really focused on what we call functional materials,
materials that are essentially designed to achieve certain
functions using quantum mechanical principles to begin with. We
also focus our research heavily in the characterization of
materials. We have tools and diagnostic methods for accurately
characterizing materials. Dr. Williams mentioned pure isotopes
of certain materials. The DOE research is also focused on
methods for production of certain isotopes. In all cases, we
coordinate our research activities in quantum materials across
our respective organizations to avoid any duplication of
effort.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you. I thank all three of our witnesses,
and with that, Madam Chair, I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. I now recognize Mr. Foster for
five minutes.
Mr. Foster. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our
witnesses.
You know, I have to say I'm not surprised at the incredible
computing power that's available in the physical universe. I
remember, you know, back learning quantum field theory at
Harvard more than 30 years old. They told us well, at every
point in space time there was infinite--an operator, an
infinite dimension matrix, and these were propagated through
time with a set of equations that are called the standard
model. And just when you think about the incredible computing
power that happens in the universe, you know, it's not
surprising that there's power out there.
What I am blown away with is the fact that over the last 30
years, we have found ways to tap into that computing power, and
that these--you know, it's just really impressive.
I was also very interested in the claim that you can
actually preserve quantum coherence at room temperature, which
is something I want to follow up with because that means that
there may be a possibility of actually having quantum computers
in your cell phone whereas previously, you know, the scenario
that people were looking at were giant supercomputer front ends
to small boxes with cryogenics in it to provide cloud-based
access so we may actually--if that is actually true, that could
change, you know, the way we actually deploy this.
Now, one of the bright spots of bipartisan agreement in
this--on this Committee and in Congress is about robust funding
for exascale computing, and so Dr. Binkley, could you discuss
how the next generation of exascale computing systems such as
the one at Argonne National Laboratory is working to bring
online in 2021 could synergize and elevate a robust quantum
computing technology ecosystem?
Dr. Binkley. Yeah, I can cite a couple of examples of where
that occurs. One is that obviously there's a tremendous search
on for quantum materials that can be used in cubit technologies
and so a lot of the simulation capabilities that exist in our
material science and chemical sciences communities can be
brought to bear on that problem.
Another area that is under active exploration is that you
can simulate quantum computers on classical computers, and in
fact, with the largest computers we have today, we can simulate
quantum computers that contain up to about 40 or so aubits, and
that actually gives us a way to begin to simulate algorithms
and do algorithm development, and that will be accelerated when
we go to the exascale-class computing.
Also, the exascale computing is giving us the ability to
look deeper into particle physics and nuclear physics
phenomena, and that'll give us insights on quantum algorithms
that can be developed in those areas as well.
Mr. Foster. Thank you. And I guess on the next panel of
witnesses we're going to see some discussion of what the key
skills that you need to get the workforce that can actually do
this, and I guess the list that appeared in the written
testimony were cryogenics, FPGA programming, superconducting
materials development, and microwave engineering. You know,
that sounds pretty much like a description of what I did during
my 25 years at Fermi National Accelerator Lab. I think
somewhere on my laptop back home are hundreds of pages of FPGA
code, cryogenic systems calculations, you know, designs of
high-power phase shifters for microwave applications and so on.
And so it strikes me that the national labs are really well
positioned to play a key role here, and so I guess the question
for Dr. Binkley, how exactly is the Department of Energy using
the capabilities of Argonne Lab and Fermilab to advance quantum
science to hopefully stay ahead of the competition here?
Dr. Binkley. So that's a very good question, and so
presently, we're really at the very beginning of that process,
and as I mentioned a little bit earlier, the first step is to
develop and deploy a few testbed computer systems at various of
our national laboratories so that researchers can begin to do
systematic development of algorithms and computational
approaches to problems. And then, you know, later on, depending
on where the field of quantum computing goes, there may be
opportunities where DOE technologies can be applied in that
path as well. But right now our focus is really on the very,
very early stage development of quantum computing algorithms
using testbeds and also looking at quantum simulation as a
technique for looking at molecular problems.
Mr. Foster. Thank you. And I guess my last question is for
Dr. Kurose and Dr. Williams. There's been two big areas, it
seems to me, one of which is the whole encryption, you know,
and communication. The other one is just using this as a
compute engine for things like, protean folding and all these
really intractable problems that we're facing, so how do you
see---in one of these areas, it's probably okay to have open
communications with the entire world. The other one just for
national defense reasons has to be very closely held. And so
how do you handle the communications between, you know, the
dark side that has to remain dark and you know, the purely
scientific side that maybe shouldn't?
Dr. Kurose. It's a great question, and I'd say that the
National Science Foundation funds open basic fundamental
scientific research, and so, if you were to look at prequantum
encryption algorithms, there's NSF funding involved in that.
Other agencies are involved when you talk about the classified
space and there are other opportunities there, but at the
National Science Foundation, the work funded is open.
Mr. Foster. Do you feel there's adequate communication or
is that just a problem you run into all the time?
Dr. Kurose. Communication among----
Mr. Foster. Between, you know, for example, your scientists
that work, you know, in the unclassified scientific area and
have good visibility into the technologies that are being
developed with the nontrivial amounts of money we're putting
into the classified sector, or is that a problem where you end
up inventing, you know, the same device in two different spaces
with a lot of inefficiency there.
Dr. Kurose. Golly. Given I don't have a clearance, it's a
little bit hard for me to comment on both sides at the same
time. Maybe I could just--if I could take 20 seconds just to
tell you a story that during World War II, some of the
fundamentals being RSA encryption were done in the dark at the
same time in England, and it was really shocking to imagine
that 2,000 years of how we were doing encryption was turned on
its head by RSA and the algorithms there, and yet unbeknownst
to the team here in the United States, there was another team
in England doing the same thing, and so sometimes there are
ideas that are in the area, really, really smart people put
together these ideas and can come up with not exactly the same
but some really similar super, super creative ideas.
Mr. Foster. I guess I've exceeded my time.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, and I now recognize Mr.
Beyer for five minutes.
Mr. Beyer. Thank you, Madam Chair, very much. Thank you all
for being here today. It's not every day you get the
opportunity to make a Schrodinger's cat joke, although it is at
the same time, right?
Anyway, I want to begin by pushing back a little back on my
good friend Mr. Rohrabacher about agreeing that yes, it does
make sense to abandon unproductive research efforts but then I
deeply believe the money should be redirected to other more
productive research efforts. At the end of the day, less
research is still less research, and that's not good for any of
us.
Dr. Binkley, you're Department of Energy. I've been
impressed today how in all the talk about QIS, there's been so
little discussion about its impact on energy, and I bring that
up because it seems to be half of what we talk about on Capitol
Hill, you know, fossil fuels, climate change, a lot of nuclear
physics here. You did mention photosynthesis and the impact
there, and sort of a passing reference to being able to explore
gas and oil better with quantum technology, but can you look
at--can you talk a little bit about the larger energy picture
and what quantum physics may bring us?
Dr. Binkley. Yes. Let's see. To begin with, there are many,
many processes for producing energy from various types of
fuels. A lot of those processes depend on chemical reactions,
and in the case of chemical reactions, quantum computing will
enable much speedier, much more accurate calculations and
simulations to be done, which will have impacts on those
systems. If you consider also the effective utilization of
biofuels, a lot of the problems that we face in understanding
biofuels and bioproducts or biomanufacturing, for that matter,
ultimately become problems in chemical reactions trying to
determine activation energies and things like that. Being able
to do more accurate, more thorough calculations using quantum
computing-based techniques will also accelerate those processes
as well. Essentially, any problem that is either materials or
chemical sciences is going to become much more tractable with
quantum computing at it becomes available in whatever time
frame. I would expect that to have direct impacts on the
energy----
Mr. Beyer. It sounds like we need to take the all-of-the-
above philosophy and add quantum physics to that.
Dr. Williams, you talked about quantum teleportation and
entanglement, the whole idea of action at distance which you
know Einstein hated, and you talked about the Chinese have now
done it over 1,200 kilometers. We also--our Committee is
Science, Space, and Technology. Do you see this --so we're now
violating the sort of absolute speed of light is the limit with
entanglement. Are there ways for us to explore deep space to
break the barriers using quantum teleportation?
Dr. Williams. So break barriers in some ways but not in
ones that violate any of the laws of physics. Again, on the
quantum teleportation, in order to actually extract the
information, you have to also have a classical channel so you
are causally limited in order to exploit it. However, again in
deep space exploration, the use of entanglement and everything
else can give us a couple of things--super dense coding--that
is ways of packing more information into a small number of
bits. Again, these amplifiers I've talked about, they can come
back in because again, that spacecraft is now so far away that
its signal takes a long time but its signal also goes out in a
very large area so only a small piece of the signal comes back
to Earth. Can I build an amplifier that allows me to pick up
that extraordinarily weak signal, and this technology allows
that. So there's numerous reasons that to agencies like NASA
and deep space exploration that this technology will be crucial
to helping us further explore and understand the basic
principles of the universe.
Mr. Beyer. Thank you very much.
Dr. Binkley, very quickly, can you tell us what quantum
gravity is?
Dr. Binkley. Well, there's ultimately the question of
merging quantum theory with the general theory of relativity,
and it's thought that quantum gravity can be explained
ultimately in those terms. How that'll affect--I mean, that's
not really a quantum computing problem per se but it's a QIS, a
quantum information science problem. It's a challenge in the
area of quantum information science. It's an unsolved problem
at this point.
Mr. Beyer. Okay. So it's--great. Thank you very much.
Mr. Chair--Madam Chair, I yield back.
Chairwoman Comstock. I thank the witnesses for their
testimony and the members for their questions. You obviously
have a lot of interested Members here today. We will now invite
our second panel up to the table, and once we get everyone
there, we can welcome and introduce our second panel of
witnesses.
Okay. Great. We'll move forward here on our second panel.
Thank you for your patience. Now, our fourth witness today is
Dr. Scott Crowder, Chief Technical Officer and Vice President,
Quantum Computing, Technical Strategy and Transformation for
IBM Systems. In this role, his responsibilities include leading
the commercialization effort for quantum computers and driving
the strategic direction across the hardware- and software-
defined systems portfolio, among other things.
He holds both a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Bachelor of
Ccience degree in international relations and electrical
engineering from Brown University as well as a Master of Arts
in economics from Stanford. He also holds a master of science
and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford.
Our fifth witness today is Dr. Chris Monroe, Distinguished
University Professor and Bice Zorn Professor in the Department
of Physics at the University of Maryland. He's also founder and
chief scientist at IonQ, Incorporated, and a Fellow of the
Joint Quantum Institute between the University of Maryland,
NIST, and the National Security Agency. Additionally, he's a
Fellow of the Center for Quantum Information and Computer
Science at the University of Maryland, NIST, and NSA.
He received his undergraduate degree from MIT and earned
his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Colorado at
Boulder, studying with Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell. His work
paved the way toward the achievement of Bose-Einstein
condensation in 1995 and the Nobel Prize in Physics for Wieman
and Cornell in 2001.
He then was a staff physicist at NIST in the group of David
Wineland, leading the team that demonstrated the first quantum
logic gate in any physical system. Based on this work, Wineland
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2012. In 2000, Dr.
Monroe became Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering
at the University of Michigan, where he pioneered the use of
single photons as a quantum conduit between isolated atoms and
demonstrated the first atom trip integrated on a semiconductor
chip. From 2006 to 2007, he was the Director of the National
Science Foundation's Ultrafast Optics Center at the University
of Michigan.
And now I will recognize Mr. Lipinski to introduce our
third witness.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. Our third witness is Dr. Supratik
Guha who is the Director of the Nanosciences and Technology
Division in Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National
Laboratory and a professor at the Institute for Molecular
Engineering at the University of Chicago.
Dr. Guha came to Argonne in 2015 after spending 20 years at
IBM Research where he served as the Director of Physical
Sciences. At IBM, Dr. Guha pioneered the research that led to
IBM's high dielectric constant metal gate transistor, one of
the most significant developments in silicon microelectronics
technology. He was also responsible for significantly expanding
the size and strategic initiative of IBM's quantum computing
group. Dr. Guha is a member of the National Academy of
Engineering and a Fellow of the Materials Research Society in
the American Physical Society. He's one of only a few
scientists who has been a tenured professor, an executive at a
major multi-national company, and the division at a major
national laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in material science
in 1991 from the University of Southern California and B. Tech
in 1985 from the Indian Institute of Technology. So welcome,
Dr. Guha.
Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. And I now recognize Dr. Crowder
for five minutes to present his testimony.
TESTIMONY OF DR. SCOTT CROWDER,
VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
FOR QUANTUM COMPUTING,
IBM SYSTEMS GROUP
Dr. Crowder. Chairwoman Comstock, Chairman Weber,
distinguished Members of the Subcommittees, thank you for this
opportunity to testify before you today. I am here representing
IBM where I lead the company's IBM Q program whose goal is to
provide quantum computing access to industry and research
institutions for business and science.
We tend to think classical computers can solve any problem
if they are just big or fast enough, but that is not the case.
There are a whole class of exponential problems that classical
computers are not good at and never really will be. One example
is simulating the behavior of atoms and molecules.
Unfortunately, for anything beyond very small molecules, this
task lies far beyond the capacity of conventional computers.
Accurately simulating relatively simple molecule like caffeine
would require a classical computer 1/10th the size of planet
Earth. With better simulation, we could do amazing things. We
could develop new life-saving drugs or manufacture incredibly
light and durable new materials for airplanes.
When I talk to leading U.S. companies about their unsolved
problems, the problems, that if solved, could bring them huge
economic benefit and competitive advantage, these exponential
problems turn up everywhere. They are problems such as
developing new materials at a chemical company, understanding
aging of batteries at an automotive company, optimizing the
supply chain at a logistics company, and hedging risk and
commodity prices at a consumer goods company. What they have in
common is they are exponential problems that have real business
value if solved.
Quantum computing holds the promise to solve these types of
real problems and bring real commercial value to U.S. industry.
It is a radically different computing paradigm that could
launch a new age of human discovery. IBM has built and made
available via cloud access real quantum computers of 5 and 16
qubits for education and exploration. These IBM Q experience
systems were the only freely available quantum computing
resource until this month when a Chinese institution made a
smaller, 4 qubit system available.
IBM has also announced IBM Q, an initiative to build the
first universal quantum computing systems commercially
available to industry and research partners. Access to 17 qubit
systems is planned for later this year with growth to 50 qubit
systems in the not-too-distant future. These systems are
located in New York and securely accessed by IBM Q partners via
the cloud.
When one examines the depth of the commitment other
countries are making in quantum computing, our belief is the
U.S. Government investment in driving this critical technology
is not sufficient to stay competitive.
The European Commission announced last year that it would
create a 1 billion Euro research effort called the quantum
technology flagship. According to estimates by McKenzie, the
European Union has twice the number of quantum researchers as
the United States and dedicates 1-1/2 times the funding. China
has also increased the national prioritization of quantum
technology. That same McKenzie study showed China has more
quantum researchers than the U.S. In China, government and
industry are working cooperatively. The Chinese Academy of
Sciences and Alibaba jointly established the Alibaba Quantum
Computing Lab with clearly defined goals to build 50-qubit and
larger systems.
Given the growing competition, what can the U.S. do to
maintain its quantum leadership? We believe success will
require partnerships between industry, academia, and government
to drive the basic research, create talent and skills required,
and help U.S. industry explore how this new technology can be
used for economic advantage. We support and commend the actions
of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science to create
quantum computing test beds. These efforts should be
significantly expanded to ensure we are putting the most
advanced quantum computers in the hands of U.S. research
scientists and early industry adopters. This should include
early stage commercial quantum computers from not just IBM but
from other industry participants to ensure exploration of
multiple underlying quantum technologies.
In order to ensure continued American leadership in
fundamental quantum technology, the U.S. Government should
partner with academic institutions to increase funding for
basic research in alternative quantum technologies and quantum
algorithms.
Finally, we must do more together to drive talent
development in quantum computing in this country. Students in
the U.S. from over 500 academic institutions are using the IBM
Q experience and the related quantum software development kit
for education and skill development. But the efforts of
industry are not enough to develop the necessary skills in
quantum information science. Government at the federal and
state levels must work with industry and academia to create
both regional centers of excellence for quantum computing and
topical centers of excellence for quantum-based solutions in
areas such as computational chemistry and optimization.
You're right to focus on U.S. quantum leadership given its
critical importance to our national competitiveness and
security. Working together, we can ensure that the U.S.
continues to lead the way in quantum computing.
Thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony on this
very important topic.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Crowder follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Comstock. I now recognize Dr. Monroe for five
minutes.
TESTIMONY OF DR. CHRISTOPHER MONROE,
DISTINGUISHED UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR &
BICE ZORN PROFESSOR,
DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS,
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND;
FOUNDER AND CHIEF SCIENTIST, IONQ, INC.
Dr. Monroe. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and the rest of
the Committee for the opportunity to be here today to testify.
As a quantum physicist and professor at the University of
Maryland and a co-founder and chief scientist at a small
company, I have over two decades of experience in the field of
quantum technology from both the academic and industrial
viewpoints.
I'm testifying here today on behalf of the National
Photonics Initiative which is a collaborative alliance among
industry, academic, and government institutes established in
2013 to raise awareness of photonics, that is, the study and
application of light at its quantum level, also to coordinate
U.S. industry, government, and academia to advance photonics-
driven fields critical to maintaining U.S. economic
competitiveness and national security.
We have outlined a proposed National Quantum Initiative as
part of the National Photonics Initiative which will provide
infrastructure for the next generation sensors, networks, and
quantum computers all based on this quantum technology we've
heard about today.
From previous witnesses this morning, we learn that quantum
devices follow radical rules. These are new rules with which to
compute and process information. For instance, with merely 100
atoms, which is a very tiny amount of material, we can store
more information than is on all of the memory in the world and
in all the hard drives in all the computers. I bring this up
because with these radical rules come radical types of hardware
to do this, and the real trick in developing quantum hardware
is to isolate it from the environment, and prevent it from
being measured until we want to measure it at the end of the
game. And photons, since I'm representing the National
Photonics Initiative, are the medium that will be used for
communication of quantum information because light can travel
large distances without interacting with its environment. It's
not hard to do that through fiber networks and so forth. A lot
of the infrastructure, that exists now can be used for quantum
communication.
But there's equally radical hardware for quantum memory;
for instance individual atoms, not just atoms as part of a big
system but individual atoms, one at a time, that are levitated
in free space in a vacuum chamber. They may be cold. They may
be at room temperature. There's all kinds of other hardware. I
bring this up because with this exotic hardware, there's a
particular problem in the field now both at academic institutes
and in industry and that is at universities, we don't build
things. We don't do engineering. You don't see an airline being
built at a university. On the other hand, industry doesn't have
the industrial engineering background. They're vastly growing
as we heard from my colleague, Dr. Crowder from IBM, and other
industry players are making a big play in this field. But the
big challenge is I can hark back to the days when classical
computers in the '50s and '60s transitioned from vacuum tubes
to silicon. The early silicon transistor was a big beast, and
miniaturizing it took the task of a new generation of
engineers. They weren't the vacuum tube engineers that did
this. And so we're in a sense missing that critical link
between research and development.
We propose the National Quantum Initiative to establish
several innovation laboratories that will indeed build devices.
These would be public-private institutes that take advantage of
the best of both worlds, having embedded industrial researchers
with young students, maybe in computer science, who don't know
so much physics and they want to get in this game. The National
Quantum Initiative will be essential for the U.S. to maintain
leadership in this field, now and into the future. We've heard
lots of testimony of our competition abroad. I sit on advisory
boards in Europe, Canada, also in China, and indeed, their
coordination is alarming. We've heard multi-billion dollar
estimates in China, both at the conglomerate Alibaba and also
the government to build quantum centers.
A National Quantum Initiative we feel is critical to move
quantum technology from its current research status to real-
world applications. Such investment would create the
infrastructure, both physical and human capital needed to
propel the U.S. into a leadership position in quantum
technology. This would create vast opportunities for workforce
creation in this field, economic growth in energy, medicine,
and security.
I again thank the committee and its leadership for the
opportunity to testify today. On behalf of myself and the
National Photonics Initiative. I look forward to answering your
questions and working with you and the committee to establish a
National Quantum Initiative. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Monroe follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. I now recognize Dr. Guha.
TESTIMONY OF DR. SUPRATIK GUHA, DIRECTOR,
NANOSCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY DIVISION,
ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY;
PROFESSOR, INSTITUTE FOR MOLECULAR ENGINEERING,
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Dr. Guha. Thank you. Chairman Weber, Chairwoman Comstock,
Ranking Member Veasey and Ranking Member Lipinski, and Members
of the Subcommittees, thank you for the opportunity to appear
before you today to discuss the status and future of quantum
technologies, as seen from the perspective of the U.S.
Department of Energy National Laboratories. I am Supratik Guha,
Director of the Center for Nanoscale Materials facility
supported by Basic Energy Sciences at the Argonne National
Laboratory.
The cost of computing has decreased by about ten orders of
magnitude in the past 60 years, due to Moore's Law scaling.
Yet, the basic architecture of the computer has remained
essentially the same. Recent developments in quantum science
promise a new computing architecture dramatically different
from anything that we have used before. Quantum computing today
is in its early stages. This technology will not replace
conventional computing machines, but it will offer
unprecedented speed and efficiency advantages over conventional
computing in three very important areas. These are in
cryptography, complex data analytics, and computational quantum
chemistry. Advances in the latter would change the way we
invent new materials. If the history of computers is any
indication, there will likely be many more applications in
future.
Subtle effects in quantum mechanics enable a quantum
computer to probe information space simultaneously rather than
sequentially, resulting in its vast superiority over classical
computing. U.S. companies have recently built small quantum
processors containing a few tenths of quantum bits, the unit
devices within a quantum computer, but today's state of the art
is a long way from where we wish to go. Quantum bits are prone
to errors. At today's level of perfection, we need quantum
processors containing tens of thousands to a million quantum
bits. Advances are required in devices in architectures, and
this will only be as good as the materials upon which these are
based.
The history of electronics has shown us that there comes a
time when massive scale fundamental materials research is
needed to propel forward initial demonstrations. This was the
case, for instance, with silicon microelectronics, which gave
us computing and the Internet. The time for that materials
ramp-up has arrived for quantum technology. There is not enough
basic materials research going on today to support the growth
that is required.
The needs are numerous. For instance, we need new materials
for high-quality quantum bits that can operate at room
temperature for quantum memory and for quantum channels that
can connect quantum chips.
Think of a fully integrated quantum processor as a number
of artificial atoms coupled together that compute and store
information. New materials hold the key to the ultimate
development of these components.
With the increasingly complex nature of today's materials
research, corporate entities are unable to carry out this basic
science work like they used to. The task, however, plays into
the strengths of the Office of Basic Energy Sciences within the
U.S. Department of Energy and the Department of Energy National
Laboratories. The Office of Basic Energy Sciences has
prioritized investments in quantum materials. The National
Laboratories offer unmatched capabilities, large-scale material
synthesis, characterization, nanofabrication, and computational
materials discovery all integrated under one roof. Their large
user facilities, the Nanoscience Research Centers, light
sources and the leadership computing facilities, tether
university-based ecosystems around them. The National Labs and
their user facilities are well-positioned to be major players
in the future of quantum research.
We need to develop an educated workforce that is able to
engage in quantum mechanics as engineers. Universities
nationwide have begun responding to this. As an example, the
University of Chicago has launched one of the first Ph.D.
programs in quantum engineering. It has also created the
Chicago Quantum Exchange, a research and educational
collaboratory with Argonne and Fermi National Laboratories.
Quantum computing is a long game but one that we cannot
afford to ignore. Thank you for your time and attention. I
would be happy to respond to any questions that you might have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Guha follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Comstock. I now recognize myself for five
minutes for questions. And let's see. From the testimony given
today in both of our panels, we know more about what the United
States is doing to pursue quantum research and development, and
we also know that other nations are heavily investing in this,
in particular the United Kingdom, Netherlands, European Union,
Australia, Canada, and, of course, China.
What are the risks to our economy and national security if
we aren't the leaders in this research, and in particular, in
quantum information science? For any of you.
Dr. Monroe. I might begin. Thank you for the question,
Madam Chairwoman. I think one of the risks I see at the
university level is students, foreign students. They come here,
they want to stay here. They want to be where the best is, and
we have the best. The U.S. is well-acknowledged as having the
best higher education system in the world. We don't want those
people leaving, frankly. I think that is a security issue in
the long run. It's an economic issue. These are highly trained
and very smart people. We want them here creating economic
growth here in the U.S.
Chairwoman Comstock. So stapling the green card to the
degree might be helpful. Okay. Others?
Dr. Crowder. Yeah. I think there's two levels of this. One
is building quantum systems in the U.S. So there's just a
nascent industry there, both as Chris and I are involved in
building a system. But there's also having U.S. companies be
early adopters in leveraging it. So they as U.S. companies get
the economic benefit and competitive advantage of leveraging
these technologies earlier. And both of those things rely on
skill development in this country, fundamentally. If we don't
develop the skills, we will not be able to execute on them.
Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. Dr. Guha?
Dr. Guha. I think the point I would like to make to add to
my colleagues here is that, you know, we need to double up this
set of skills because there are, most likely, as yet unknown
new industries that can be jumpstarted from the science that
would come out of this, in addition to, you know, to the
benefits we would have in leading areas of cryptography or
materials design.
So it would be extremely important to be able to have
strong educational, fundamental scientific base in the quantum
information sciences in the U.S.
Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. Thank you. And I did want to
take this opportunity now, since we have a staffer here, Sarah
Jorgenson. This is her last hearing because she's moving to
another committee and leaving us. So, I did want to thank her
for all of her great work, and you got a really exciting,
interesting hearing for your last hearing. Thank you for your
leadership on the committee, and we look forward to many great
things from you.
I'll now yield to Mr. Lipinski.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. I thank all the witnesses for
their testimony. In Dr. Monroe's testimony, he presents the
idea of establishing a new quantum engineering degree programs
at universities as a component of the National Quantum
Initiative. And Dr. Guha, I know that the University of Chicago
has already established one of the first quantum engineering
degree programs.
So Dr. Guha, could you describe the program at UC? Is there
any advice you'd give to other universities interested in
launching their own programs such as this?
Dr. Guha. Thank you. So, the Chicago Quantum Exchange was
formed very recently out of an organic need to connect
industry, university, and the National Laboratories together.
We believe that the future of education, particularly in the
quantum information sciences, lies in establishing
multidisciplinarity and the ability to connect academia and
industry together in order to make progress in an important
area such as this.
So the Chicago Quantum Exchange has been formed by the
University of Chicago, as I mentioned, along with Argonne
National Labs and Fermi Labs. Students will work with staff
scientists in the government labs as well as with academia. We
have recently received some funding from the National Science
Foundation, along with Harvard, in order to be able to have
students, graduate students have tandem advisors, one from
industry, one from academia, to push forward with this concept
that we really need to start pulling industry and academia and
government labs together. This really needs to happen if we
want to be able to translate basic science eventually into
applicable technology.
Mr. Lipinski. In the degree program itself, is there
anything that you would--advice to give other universities
interested in launching their own such programs that perhaps if
they don't have the access to a National Lab like Argonne that
UC has?
Dr. Guha. I think that the access to the National Labs that
UC has is a huge advantage. We've seen that it helps us attract
students, for instance, because these labs have capabilities
that are unmatched at universities.
The other part that we focused for the Ph.D. program is, as
I mentioned, in pushing forward multidisciplinarity, connecting
with computer science. If you look at the faculty at the
University of Chicago involved in quantum information sciences,
they come from a variety of backgrounds, from physics. My own
background is in metallurgical engineering to computer science,
nanosciences, nanotechnology, I've worked in these areas over
the past decade, has improved the interdisciplinarity of the
field. But this takes it one step further so the educational
content, we try to reflect that.
Mr. Lipinski. I know, Dr. Monroe, you're proposing the
National Quantum Initiative. It includes the development in
support of four very well-funded quantum innovation labs. I
think this is--is this something similar to--do you see these
as being similar to the Chicago Quantum Exchange, that concept?
Dr. Monroe. I would say to back up a little bit. At my
institute, at the University of Maryland, we probably have the
largest cadre of academic and government researchers in quantum
sciences in one place, including NIST, LPS which is part of
NSA, and the university. We have a computer science center, a
quantum science center, and an engineering center is on the
way.
But I applaud the efforts at Chicago which is obviously
well-situated with Fermi and Argonne Labs in the back yard. And
for this National Quantum Initiative, I think we need to have a
critical mass of people from different disciplines. It's
absolutely critical. Whenever you use your iPhone, you don't
know or understand what's inside, and that's why it's useful.
We need people to program the higher levels of these devices,
and they will not be knowledgeable about every little piece.
You just can't. I think I made an analogy to the aircraft
engineering. I don't think there's a single person that
understands every piece of an F-35. It's too big and complex. A
large quantum computer is not as yet complex as that, but it's
approaching that. When it gets big, it will be. And so we're
going to have to. It's required that this field--and I think
I'm echoing everything all the witnesses are saying--that we
have people from a variety of fields, including engineering,
computer science, physics, all the physical sciences,
chemistry, information theory, mathematics.
Mr. Lipinski. Okay. Thank you. My time is up so I yield
back.
Chairwoman Comstock. I now recognize Mr. Lucas forfive
minutes.
Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. Dr. Crowder, in
your testimony you conclude that federal grants in support of
core quantum research and development are being eclipsed by
other governments. Can you expand on that for a moment?
Dr. Crowder. Sure. I mean, the United States has put a lot
of investment into quantum information science. But if you just
look at the estimates that folks like McKenzie have done and
just look at the announcements recently by China and by other
countries, they are investing more heavily than we are.
I think it's really important, again, from an industry
perspective, especially a multi-national company like IBM that
has a view of more than just the United States, that we
continue to do the basic research for two reasons, one, because
of what my colleagues here have stated in terms of just pushing
the technology forward but also really to build the skills that
are going to be necessary for commercialization. I mentioned it
before. There are three types of skills that we see gaps in.
Some of them I would say, like FPGA programming or more
traditional skills, that maybe are mid-career we can train
people to go into.
But quantum information science requires pretty in-depth
graduate-level work, and if we do not continue to fund basic
research at the graduate and post-doctorate level in this
country, we just won't have the skills.
Mr. Lucas. To continue with that line of thought, and
whether it's specific areas of research that are being outpaced
in or areas where we should be engaged, that would be vital to
our dominance, at the pace we're at right now, looking at what
the rest of the world is doing based on the information
available to you, at what point do we get behind the curve that
we can't catch up if we don't make those investments? Because
certainly there comes a point. If you get far enough out, ahead
of the rest of the world, then you can't catch up.
Dr. Crowder. Yeah, as other people have said, I do think
we're at a couple inflection points here. We're at the stage
now where quantum computing is becoming real. I mean, we put a
real quantum computer, albeit small one, on the Internet last
May, May 2016, and it's been up and running since then and
we've, you know, grown that from 5 qubits to 16 qubits, and
we've announced that this year we're building slightly more
powerful quantum computers for, you know, commercial
availability.
So I think we're at a very interesting inflection point in
this technology. If we don't make the investments in both the
underlying skills and also as other people have mentioned, the
technology of people learning how to use these systems, we
will, from an American point of view, fall behind. I can't give
you an exact date, but the trajectory isn't sufficient.
Mr. Lucas. Dr. Monroe, along that similar line, when it
comes to research and infrastructure involving light sources or
neutron sources, follow up if you would for a moment, expand a
bit on how we're faring in that international competition, real
or imaginary.
Dr. Monroe. As you've heard today, there are a variety of
technologies that are behind successful quantum device, and
these are technologies that are themselves maybe not
necessarily quantum. I think Dr. Williams mentioned the idea of
purifying isotopes of silicon and make it ultra-pure, and
through some of our DOE labs, we are world leaders in that
area. I think we have a proud history of leading device
fabrication in silicon which will play a role in almost every
quantum technology, even if it's not based in the bulk of
silicon. For instance, in my technology, we use silicon
electrodes that are pretty far away, but they need to be
machined to be just beautiful. And this happens at Sandia
National Laboratory, a DOE laboratory, and no place in the
world can really compete at that point. I think the fact that
we have many big corporations, IBM, Google, Intel, Microsoft,
playing in this field is really the strength we have. And to
me, it's really a workforce issue. And I think other countries,
from what I see, they can organize in a top-down way because
often the industry is their country. They're very linked that
way. And in a sense, there are coordinations that can happen
that are very fast in some places, particularly China. And I
see in the U.S., our system is not or maybe it shouldn't be
like that, but the government can play a role I think to better
bring together academic research in this field, pure science,
the devices, the manufacturing, and the workforce that will be
at industry.
Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Doctor. I yield back, Madam Chair.
Chairwoman Comstock. I now recognize Mr. Veasey for five
minutes.
Mr. Veasey. Thank you, Madam Chair. I wanted to ask Dr.
Guha about collaboration and was wondering if you could
describe how the private sector partners with National
Laboratories on quantum-based technologies and how has this
relationship changed as the investments in quantum information
science, both public and private, have increased in recent
years?
Dr. Guha. So there is collaboration between the private
sector and the public sector in, you know, areas related to
quantum information sciences through the large user facilities,
for instance, the light sources. Companies like IBM have used
our light sources at Argonne. This is just one example. Also
through the nanoscience facilities, the NSRCs. That's another
channel through which this is--these are also--there are five
such user facilities across the U.S. distributed in the DOE
labs. And that's another avenue where we collaborate with
industry because the Nanoscience Research Centers possess
state-of-the-art capabilities for manipulation of atoms and
structures at the nanoscale.
There have been good examples in areas such as battery
development, for instance, at Argonne again to give you an
example where cathode materials have been developed through
basic energy science's funding at Argonne, then through ERE
funding, and now these are in major hybrid cars that are sold
in the U.S. and worldwide.
So there certainly is a structure and a system for this
type of public-private collaboration. And I think this would
only increase as we go forward and put more emphasis on quantum
information sciences.
Mr. Veasey. Thank you very much. I also want to ask you
about the Department of Energy. As you know, it's home to many
scientific user facilities that focus on the fundamental
sciences that underpins quantum technologies. How are users
taking advantage of the facilities stewarded by the DOE Office
of Science to advance our understanding of quantum information
science?
Dr. Guha. So that's a good question. I'll give you another
example. For instance, if we go back to the nanoscience
research facilities, some of the tools that we are starting to
build and starting to equip ourselves with are tools that can
deal with single photon measurements to measure correlations
between different single photon emitters. So these are tools
that basically now start enabling you to figure out how to
create and manipulate single quanta of information and try to
look at the entanglement between them, which is sort of at the
heart of quantum information sciences.
So we are beginning to start getting these tools on line
and pulling in users, initially from academia and then from the
industry as well hopefully as we go forward. So these are
things that are beginning to happen.
Mr. Veasey. Thank you. Thank you very much. Madam Chair, I
yield back my time.
Chairwoman Comstock. I now recognize Ms. Bonamici for five
minutes.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you very much, Chair Comstock. Thank
you to each of the witnesses. Dr. Monroe, you talk in your
testimony about the challenges of transition from research to
marketplace, and that's an issue that we've discussed many
times on this committee, commercialization of research, and you
mention workforce challenges and dealing with small companies
where there are not yet high-volume applications and the lack
of expertise. So that's what you mentioned. Are there policy
barriers that we as Congress could address? Are there barriers
through policy changes that we could work on?
Dr. Monroe. Thank you for the question. The one I would
bring up--and again, I'm opening a can of worms. It's
intellectual property laws, and I think my colleague, Dr.
Williams from NIST, brought this up. And in my view, to get
full engagement of industry, they have to be able to protect
their own IP, their own interests in the long run, but they
also--I think the reason it could work, having an innovation
lab, quantum innovation lab, is that these big industry
players, they understand that they're going to get people.
They're going to get qualified people that can go back home and
then build devices that can be commercial.
So again, I don't know the answer to it. I'm probably not
the expert here with regard to IP law. But somehow, to dangle
that carrot in front of industry to have their engineers
embedded. I will note, by the way, that Intel has an
arrangement with the University of Delft in the Netherlands
where they do exactly this. And I don't know exactly how this
works with regard to IP, but they have embedded engineers that
are building silicon devices at Delft. And the researchers
there, the academics, they're reaping the benefits of having
professionals in place that really know this stuff.
Ms. Bonamici. Terrific. We can look at that model and also
work with our colleagues on the Judiciary Committee on the IP
issues. And Dr. Monroe, to follow up your National Quantum
Initiative, the way I understand it, you're really talking
about four well-funded quantum innovation labs. So I wanted to
ask, in that type of model, is there a way that we could
address--you know, some of the breakthroughs have come from
unexpected places. How would that model be able to work with,
for example, the bright faculty and students at lesser-known
colleges and universities or the small businesses that are not
in the vicinity of one of those innovation labs? What would be
the plan to be more broad-reaching than just having the four
innovation labs?
Dr. Monroe. Well, I think it would require full engagement
of relevant agencies, and I think the science agencies that
were in the previous round of witnesses, DOE, NIST, and NSF,
are natural to play a huge role in making these hubs happen.
And NSF in particular, they deal with blue skies research. They
deal with small colleges. They're very good at bringing big
science, cutting-edge science, down to even undergraduate
institutions. So I think having their engagement will be
important.
And I might add, one federal vehicle that also works very
well with industry is the SBIR and STTR programs. These are----
Ms. Bonamici. Right.
Dr. Monroe. --grant programs, largely from the DOD, that
can go into industry for more researchy type things.
Ms. Bonamici. Terrific. And for all the panelists, the
title of this hearing is of course about American leadership.
And I know it's been addressed and the Chair brought it up and
others have as well.
Dr. Monroe, you just mentioned the Intel partnership with
Delft. Are there, among the panel there, other examples where
we could look at either models, work that's being done in other
countries? Where are we seeing leadership efforts that we could
either replicate or that we should take note of? Dr. Crowder?
Dr. Crowder. Yeah. I think one of the things that you see
in Europe especially is research institutions deeply partnering
with industry participants to provide them with access to
quantum technologies. That's one of the things we haven't
talked about too much on this panel is not just the underlying
quantum technology itself but the algorithms and use cases that
you need to develop for that. And you see things going on in
the UK, in Oxford, things going on in Germany and some of the
research institutions there that I think are really best
practices, where they're--I can certainly see a place like
Oakridge expanding their test beds to do very similar things
to, you know, open up access through their user facilities to
these new technologies.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you. In my remaining few seconds, Dr.
Guha or Dr. Monroe, do you want to add to that?
Dr. Guha. I think I'd just like to add one more point to
what Dr. Crowder said which is that, you know, if you look at
China and the funding they are investing, they're putting it in
focused centers. And I think there's some benefit to that. And
I think we should think about that as well.
If you look at the European funding, it's going more
distributed. And I feel that the focused approach, you know,
this is something we ought to look at carefully.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you. And as I yield back, Madam Chair,
I just want to point out in follow up to the prior panel that
in South China, the South China Morning Post, they just had an
article about their new STEAM school. And a recent study in
Korea found that STEAM is a highly effective teaching and
learning method.
So as I yield back, I'll point that out to you, Madam
Chair, and thank our colleagues.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you.
Chairwoman Comstock. And I now recognize Representative
Tonko for five minutes.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Madam Chair. Quantum information
science is a rapidly growing field with public and private
investments growing across the world. Just how does the United
States stack up against international competitors in this
field? Who's leading the race in developing the next generation
of what may well be revolutionary technologies?
Dr. Monroe. Thank you for the question. I might begin on
academic side in that by its nature, academic science is
international, and there are many great collaborations. I have
some in Europe and so forth. And I would say academically, the
science behind QIS is proceeding most rapidly in the U.S.
still. China is not far behind and the same can be said for the
EU. I think they're all powerhouses in this field.
In terms of the technology development, this is where the
U.S. is ahead for now, and I think it's largely driven by
industry. We have the industry that the others are struggling
to come up with. But I think where China and the EU have an
interesting advantage is just how they can make top-down things
happen, and it's just the nature of the beast.
We keep returning to China. This is a very capital-
intensive field to get this exotic hardware to engineer. It
does take a large amount of investments, and I think that
China, without the bat of an eye, can just do it.
So this is something I look in the future as maybe an early
warning sign that, you know, now is the time to get a head of
the curve on that.
Mr. Tonko. Certainly now is not the time to cut into some
of these investments, as we've heard?
Dr. Monroe. Yes, I agree with that.
Mr. Tonko. Okay. Do our other doctors have any comments in
that regard?
Dr. Guha. So I agree with Dr. Monroe that the U.S. is
leading the race, but the next few years are going to be very
interesting, particularly with respect to China. There's two
things to note. One, the results on their satellite link that I
think is an engineering tour de force. This type of link was
first, you know, demonstrated via a DARPA project in 2003
between Boston University and Harvard and a private company, if
I remember correctly. But the fact that they're able to do this
via satellite is a big deal, and we should take notice of this.
And the second is the hiring that's going on in China in the
quantum area, in hiring Ph.D. scientists putting huge amounts
of investments in starting up labs.
So we really need to take note of this. In the next few
years, you know, China has I believe made the decision that
they want to wrap up in this area, although the U.S. clearly
has the superiority today.
Mr. Tonko. Um-hum. And Dr. Crowder?
Dr. Crowder. I think my colleagues have said it well. I
mean, I think American industry clearly has leadership in this
space. I think from an academic point of view the United
States, our academic institutions are clear leaders in this
space, although in academics and skill development I will say
that there is a lot of good work going on worldwide. So there's
a lot of skill development happening in Europe, in Canada, and
Australia and Japan, as well as in China.
Mr. Tonko. And what would you suggest we need to prioritize
in order to secure our competitive edge here in this critical
field? You talked about us, you know, holding onto maybe a
leading status. But what's most critical for us to do to
maintain that or grow it?
Dr. Crowder. So I think there's two levels here, one, which
I touched on before which is we need the skill development from
a U.S. economy point of view. I think we do have industry
leadership in actually building these systems and the
technology behind it, but I do think we need to continue to
invest highly in skill development which means investments and
basic research. And then the second is we need to make these
systems available to U.S. researchers and to U.S. companies.
The algorithm development we haven't really touched on her, but
there's a lot of possibilities for quantum. But until someone
develops the algorithms, those possibilities will not be turned
into real business value. There's a lot of work that needs to
get done in algorithm development.
Mr. Tonko. Dr. Monroe?
Dr. Monroe. Yeah, thanks for the question. I might add to
that that it's a precarious situation for industry or a company
to be in a game where they're building a device where we don't
actually know exactly what it's going to be used for. This is
exactly what happened with conventional computing back in the
'50s. It was built for certain purposes but nobody envisioned
packing billions of transistors on a watch or an iPhone.
Dr. Kurose in the last session mentioned that quantum
computing is not a panacea. It's not going to solve every type
of problem, but we need to get these devices out there to
users, for users to solve the problem. That may be a difficult
argument to make to stockholders in a big company. So that's
where I think there is some vulnerability.
Mr. Tonko. Dr. Guha, did you----
Dr. Guha. I will simply add that, you know, we need to make
sure that we continue to have superiority in the basic
underlying science behind this field. That's absolutely
important. And we should probably set some goals and targets,
you know, ten-year goals, 15-year goals, and sort of pull the
science along through those targets.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you. I yield back, Madam Chair.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I now recognize Mr.
Foster for five minutes.
Mr. Foster. Thank you, Madam Chair. First, before I go into
policy discussions, Dr. Guha, a question about your previous
existence. What is the current state of the art for thinox
dielectrics versus high-k dielectrics, just in terms of the
number of atomic layers?
Dr. Guha. So the electronic equivalent number of atomic
layers is something on the order of, you know, seven angstroms
or something, less than a nanometer. It's the electronic
equivalent. Physically it's a little thicker but that's what
you gain from using a high dielectric constant material.
Mr. Foster. Yeah. This has evolved so much since I was
designing ICs back in the 1990s. It's amazing what has been
accomplished. And I guess there's no clear example of Moore's
Law hitting the fence than just the thickness of, you know, the
dielectric barriers and mosfets.
Anyway, now back to the policy stuff, you've touched on a
lot of issues I was thinking of bringing up having to do with
what is the right development model for something like this
that requires a long-term investment? I mean, the whole
business was jump started by the discovery in principle I
believe at Bell Labs that you could actually in principle,
theoretically, factor large primes with quantum computing and
thereby blow up, you know, the then-current cryptography, which
had huge implications.
So the problem there is Bell Labs is gone, right? And
they're gone because they existed only because we basically
socialized that piece of research that we provided Bell Labs
with a monopoly on long distance that provided an income stream
to develop a really a wonderful natural resource that only
existed because, you know, we gave them a special monopoly. You
know, it's a peculiar way to have socialized research. The
national labs are really the only, you know, socialized
research that we actually have in this country, and it's unique
and I think it's necessary for long-term and speculative
developments. You simply can't, as you say, sell the
stockholders on this.
One of the biggest things that I worry about all the time
is intellectual property. You know, this is a huge problem.
It's sort of an interesting policy debate because it doesn't--
it's something that's not really a moral argument. It's an
argument on how you maximize economic and technological
progress.
And so are there things that you think are really--you
know, if you could have two or three fixes in intellectual
property, what would they be? You know, for example, many
countries don't allow algorithms to be patented, computer
algorithms to be patented. And that's something that's gone
back and forth in this country. So how does intellectual
property play into the development of, say, quantum algorithms
on this? Does our current policy encourage it or discourage it?
Dr. Monroe. Yeah, I will say that in my experience in small
business, we're told by our investors you have to get an IP
portfolio. And it's almost irrational. I guess as a scientist I
find it as a little bit of a nuisance, but I do understand the
importance of it because if you don't have it, you will be
playing defense against somebody who is just sitting on
intellectual property.
So I would not be against tightening different facets of
what can be patented or not, mathematic equations----
Mr. Foster. As expanding--but saying, you know, if you
could patent quantum algorithms for example, you know, would
that increase or decrease the amount of interest and the rate
of development of these?
Dr. Monroe. My gut feeling is it would decrease. I think
it's such an early stage right now that it will maybe scare
away others and impede progress in the field.
Mr. Foster. Yeah, that would be interesting to talk to, you
know, venture capitalists to see if they agree with the same
thing because it's a--now, in addition, Dr. Guha touched on the
question of whether we centralize or disperse, you know, the
centers of excellence. Do we have centers of excellence or do
we do, you know, the European model of spreading the technology
to a zillion institutions? You know, the obvious--if you see
what industry does for things like biotechnology, they just
have a very strong clumping effect that occurs naturally, not
so much because of the intrinsic merits of where they decide to
clump but simply because of the network effects of having a
bunch of people nearby that you can, you know, steal employees
from each other as you expand and contract.
And so, you know, is this something that we should be
fighting against or should we, you know, in the European way of
trying to spread out the research or should we just say, okay,
we're going to have a clump of this, you know, for example, in
the Illinois 11th District would be a fine place? But you know,
what are your thoughts on that? And I will skip Dr. Guha which
I presume would conclude, would agree with me here.
Dr. Crowder. Yeah, I think there's two competing forces
here. I definitely think that having centers of excellence and
concentrating, especially for topical areas, makes a whole lot
of sense from a resource point of view.
On the flipside, when I talk to companies about their plans
to leverage this, they have the same skill issues that other
people have. And what they want is to partner with a local
university to do the early research and then so they have
someone to hire in two years when this becomes large.
So I do think we need to balance it. I do think there's
advantages of having centers of excellence, especially from an
access point of view. It doesn't necessarily make sense for
everybody to have a user facility for, you know, quantum
computing. You should have, you know, a couple user facilities
that, you know, other people can get access--other academic
institutions can access from. Similarly, I think you need
centers of excellence in particular areas so you have a
critical mass. But I do think you need regional participation
and the academics behind this because you will have companies
that need to get skills from regional areas.
Dr. Monroe. Do I have time to add one thing? As a high-
energy physicist, you certainly appreciate that CERN and Fermi
Lab are these big naturally clumping things. You're studying
one problem, and it takes a thousand people to do that.
Quantum computing is not that. I think there are many
different technologies. They're wildly different, and I think
these innovation hubs can maybe specialize in one at a time at
each hub, for instance, that's one model. I think it is
clumping, not as much as high-energy physics, but I think we
would find a few areas of specialization. One might be more
devoted on software, a computer side of things where they don't
care about the hardware, and the others will develop particular
hardwares.
Mr. Foster. Fascinating. Let's see. Do any of you know
roughly how many, you know, say photonics Ph.D.s come out of
China every year compared to the U.S.? Do you have a feeling
for that or just overall? Ph.D.s with relevant skills.
Dr. Monroe. I think they probably beat us on that. I
actually don't know the numbers. I shouldn't speculate.
Mr. Foster. Okay. I remembered----
Dr. Monroe. There's a lot. There's a lot.
Mr. Foster. --seeing a very, in some sub-specialties, at
least a very high ratio, and you know, that's a problem.
Because the workforce development is huge, and I think it's--
anyway, I just want to thank you all for bringing this,
attending this very important hearing, and thank the Chair for
holding the hearing.
Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I thank this panel of
witnesses also for their testimony and expertise. As you can
tell, the members were very interested in this topic, and
obviously it's a very competitive area where we appreciate all
of your insight. I think it will need to be a continuing
conversation on how we can continue to be the leaders and
remain competitive and the kind of workforce that we're going
to need. I think there'll be a lot more questions to ask and
issues to develop along this way.
So the record will remain open for two weeks for additional
written comments and questions from the members. And the
hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:48 p.m., the Subcommittees were
adjourned.]