Photonic founder speaks on quantum advantage for enterprises

*Please give us a little introduction on your current role and what you do

I’m Dr. Stephanie Simmons, the founder and Chief Quantum Officer of Photonic Inc. I drive the technical vision at Photonic, and manage the technical team building our fault-tolerant quantum computing and quantum networking products based on photonically-linked silicon spin qubits.

I am also the co-chair of the advisory board to Canada’s National Quantum Strategy, a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Silicon Quantum Technologies, a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Fellow in Quantum Information Science, and an Associate Professor at the Department of Physics at Simon Fraser University (SFU) based in Metro Vancouver.

*What do you consider your biggest professional achievement to date?

I have been dedicated to the pursuit of large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum technologies since 2001 and am proud of the contributions I’ve made to the development of silicon spin, and now silicon spin-photon hardware modalities. Some of the early work I’ve contributed to includes the first demonstration of solid-state entanglement, record-smashing coherence times of 3 hours, and the first silicon dot spin CNOT gate. Above all these, however, I must share that my most substantial professional achievement to date is the development of the networked quantum computing architecture we are pursuing here at Photonic Inc.

What are you most excited about for quantum in 2023? What predictions do you have for the year ahead?

I believe 2023 will mark a turning point for quantum technologies on many fronts, up and down the entire quantum stack. I believe the quantum world will start to appreciate that NISQ isn’t the same as fault-tolerant quantum technologies, that QLDPC codes have moved the goalposts far closer for all of us, and that modular quantum computers offer the opportunity to massively scale quantum processors across a quantum network.

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Where does your organization sit within the quantum ecosystem?

Fault-tolerance is crucial to quantum computers being able to achieve the speedups and computational benefits the industry has been discussing for years. And at Photonic, we are building fault-tolerant quantum technologies – both computers and networks – that will unlock a lot of value sooner than many realise.

Will 2023 be a year we come closer to quantum advantage for enterprises. If so how?

We get closer to fault-tolerance every year, even if today’s customers working with NISQ systems aren’t able to benefit from that progress. Many companies, like mine, are quietly working on making quantum advantage a reality for enterprises. However, it’s unlikely that in 2023 companies will suddenly realize quantum advantage. And that’s not a bad thing – most organizations aren’t ready.

Large-scale quantum computers will bring about huge opportunities and security concerns. Very few enterprises are ready for either of these.

Companies need to be doing internal audits to identify which business processes will be able to benefit from quantum computers, then work to build the internal capacity and the external relationships that will be required to quickly see quantum advantage when the computing capacity exists.

These organizations also need to be securing their data today, ahead of scalable fault-tolerant quantum computers being available and putting modern encryption at risk. They need to be identifying data that is at risk and actively executing a strategy to keep their data and communications safe.

Quantum advantage is coming sooner than we think. It won’t be 2023, but it’s close enough that enterprises should be actively putting major resources into their preparations.

What do you think the key challenges of working with quantum in the NISQ era is?

NISQ systems are an important step in our decades-long quantum journey. But when it comes to using them with real world applications, they are not reliable enough. We need fault-tolerant quantum computers to achieve the reliability and scale required for quantum advantage.

Because of this, NISQ computers cannot meaningfully help companies understand and anticipate the impact of fault-tolerant quantum computing on their business. The target algorithms for future trustworthy fault-tolerant quantum technologies are numerous and varied (check out www.quantumalgorithmzoo.org) and these have not yet been concretely and numerically mapped to all the possible customer use cases. One of the key challenges of working in the NISQ era is that it has led end users to believe that NISQ is what quantum computing is all about – it's not, the full promise of quantum computing is about the exponential speedups to come once we establish fault-tolerance.

Quantum.Tech covers quantum computing, cryptography as well as sensing; what area are you most excited about and why?

I’ve been working on quantum computing for decades, so of course I’m excited about it. But quantum networking is another area that has my focus these days, because these networks will allow quantum computers to horizontally scale. It will also enable secure sensing, blind computing, even the teleportation (of data)! We need trustworthy entanglement distribution technologies to unlock all that quantum has to offer the world.

Photonic will be attending Quantum.Tech USA as sponsors on April 25-26. To see Photonic this April, register today