Quantum Technologies Major Innovation Project (April 2018 - March 2023)
The Quantum Technologies Major Innovation Project is an effort to establish Alberta as a hub for Quantum Technologies in Canada by integrating Alberta's internationally recognized academic excellence, partnerships, and industry engagements. This effort has been broken down into three work projects as outlined below.
Quantum sensors are measurement devices that exploit quantum resources to exceed quantum-noise limitations, and is a near-term application of quantum. Alberta has formidable strength in optomechanical sensing, and the MIF project will enable quantum-enhanced sensor development, thereby launching Alberta capability tiJ the forefront of ultraprecise sensing. Over the timeframe of the project, provincial nanomagnetism research will benefit as an end user; in the longer term, commercialization is expected with receptor uptake in resource exploration and navigation beyond global positioning systems.
Quantum communication refers to the task of exchanging quantum informational states, as a generalization of today's informational states represented as binary strings, between separate users, or clients. When paired with a suite of protocols such as quantum key distribution, quantum-secret sharing and blind quantum computing, quantum communication enables information-theoretic secure transfer of information-both classical and quantum-that is impervious to computational attacks.
Quantum computing has the potential to disrupt current practice and technology by providing a new paradigm for problem solving. In Alberta, we have the expertise to lead this change by developing algorithms that solve problems more efficiently than current methods using quantum resources, to build and verify a quantum simulation apparatus that solves quantum problems experimentally, and to develop qubit-processing hardware.