I work for a company that has always been committed to research and innovation as a form of economic growth. Investing in research is investing in the future.

We have recently invested a lot of money in a start-up founded by young scientists who are making important progress in the field of quantum cryptography.

Committing to technologies that are not yet mature is clearly a risk, but doing it before everyone else maximises your profits if you succeed.

I am very excited: I have just won a scholarship to take the Master's Degree in Quantum Science and Technologies in Barcelona.

In addition to learning more about the fascinating world of quantum physics, I will lay the foundation for my career in an expanding field that promises to shape the technologies of the future.

And that is not all: the scholarship will allow me to experience a new country and come into contact with a different culture.

I am a physics teacher at a secondary school. I am concerned about people's lack of knowledge about scientific matters. There are more and more pseudo-scientific scams that use technical names and take advantage of misinformation and lack of critical spirit, which do nothing but take money from people. No, there is such thing as a quantum doctor! Science is not magic.

I am trying to get my students to understand scientific concepts and analyze with a critical attitude the information they receive in their daily life.

New quantum technologies are emerging that promise to revolutionise the information and communication world: in order to maximise this potential, the European Union is planning to build quantum communications infrastructure, which would allow quantum devices to be connected and eventually form a quantum internet. This infrastructure will make use of the current fibre optic network for short- and medium-distance connections and combine satellites to cover longer distances. The most sensitive data, such as personal, financial and government information, as well as electricity grid, air traffic control and health system data, will thus be protected thanks to quantum physics.

Photo: Clouds of cold atoms in one of ICFO's laboratories.

Thanks to superposition and entanglement, a computer with quantum bits (qubits) is much faster at solving some essential problems such as factorisation (very important for current cryptography!), optimisation problems and simulations, which even with the best computers we currently have would take millions of years to solve. 

There are some quantum computers now, but they do not yet have enough bits to surpass traditional computers.  

ICFO is home to some of the coldest places on earth, but no-one can go inside them. In these places the temperature is lower than in deep space: just a few fractions of a degree (hundredths of a nanokelvin) above absolute zero.

Only a few laboratories in the world can reproduce these extreme conditions in small vacuum chambers, where they can trap small numbers of atoms (from a few million to a single atom, depending on the experiment). In order to be able to study the interesting quantum properties that appear at such low temperatures, it is essential for the atoms to be as cold (and therefore as still) as possible.

Photo: One of the ICFO labs where atoms are cooled to close to absolute zero.

Quantum physics has enabled us to better understand the properties of many materials, such as semiconductors, but there are some we do not understand because the calculations we would have to perform to understand them are too complex, even for the most powerful computers.

As we wait for the arrival of quantum computers, we can start using simple quantum systems that we can precisely control in a lab, such as a cloud of cold atoms, which behave like the more complex systems we want to study. These are quantum simulators, which promise to help us understand materials that are interesting for their technological applications, such as superconductors.

An open debate on quantum physics is how it is interpreted. The most common and oldest one (1925-1927) is the Copenhagen interpretation (which we have used in the Info Cards). However, there are other interpretations, such as the many-worlds interpretation (approx. 1960), which suggests that when we perform a measurement, all possible results appear in parallel universes, but we only observe one. One of the problems the interpretations have is that it is not clear whether they are experimentally verifiable.

Although quantum technologies are still in a very early stage, their applications in very wide range of areas are enormously promising. Thomas J. Watson, the CEO of IBM, apparently said in 1943 that "there is a market for about 5 computers" in the world.

It is possible for us, at the present moment, to judge the possible impact of new technologies?

Their applications in all fields of human activity will radically change our lives, just as electricity and electronics once did. We must invest as much as we can in their development, to make them commercially viable as soon as possible. 

We should not be fooled by illusory promises. We have gone very far with traditional technologies and we still have a long way to go: we should keep the current investment in quantum technologies at the same level. Let scientists do their work and continue to research, focusing on maintaining and improving the technologies that we already have. 

Research into quantum physics and its applications is positive, but we currently have other far more important and pressing issues, such as hunger, poverty, wars and terrorism. Let us maintain research, but invest our money to find solutions to the major problems our society has today.  

Quantum technologies are very promising, but if they are to be effective, they require solid knowledge of their foundations. We should invest in fundamental research: a better understanding of the foundations of quantum physics will naturally lead to the development of its applications.