Over the past five years, groundbreaking strides in the field of quantum information have been made in the international scientific community. Experts from around the world have worked on deciphering the mysterious mechanisms that underlie the basic operating principles of entanglement and superposition, the most important traits that any quantum system has. Part of the work was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), under a £10-million grant. The grant is currently approaching its end, so experts met up recently to discuss the progresses that were made, AlphaGalileo reports.

Thanks to the EPSRC money, more and more researchers were drawn into this potentially lucrative field, which could be worth many billions of dollars when the first quantum communication networks are opened to the public. The promise of safe and fast communications will undoubtedly attract a lot of operators and private Internet consumers, and those who developed the technologies employed in the new system will make millions off their work. The only thing that needs to happen first is to get the field off the ground, and this requires a lot more manpower on the job, analysts say.

On Thursday, December 10, leading representatives from the academia, the government and businesses gathered at the Institute of Physics, in the United Kingdom, to establish the next priorities in quantum communications, which will need to be pursued under different grants. “We need to invest £50 to £100 million in something which can give the UK a truly global lead with big market opportunities. I’m talking a £5 to £10 billion pound return, not just a billion,” successful venture capitalist Dr. Hermann Hauser, who is associated with Cambridge’s Silicon Fen, said. His presentation was named “Disentangling a billion dollar opportunity.”

“The promise of quantum information processing emerges from the remarkable property of being able to manipulate information to be in two states at once. There is spectacular potential in the field of sensors, quantum cryptography and computing. The UK started the second quantum revolution with the exploitation of quantum coherence in 1990 and now we need to ensure that we maintain a lead,” Imperial College London (ICL) quantum optics theorist, Professor Sir Peter Knight added in front of the audience. The expert was part of a group of scientists that presented the latest findings in the field before Hauser's presentation.