Last week, another startup announced its plans to join the growing group of businesses, universities, and government agencies at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP). The facility, a multibillion-dollar, 128-acre research campus that is being built on the former site of the U.S. Steel South Works on the Southeast Side, is backed by Gov. JB Pritzker but has drawn criticism from neighbors who have accused the site selection process of lacking transparency and community involvement.
As companies begin what seems like the next space race to develop increasingly complex quantum computers, the promise of quantum computing could mean an unprecedented future, and profits, for whoever can say use quantum computing to develop new forms of data encryption, or determine how to model molecules to develop drugs for diseases long thought to be incurable.
IQMP would bring together local universities such as the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, along with the U.S. Department of Defense, and private companies like PsiQuantum, IBM, and Infleqtion, announced that they were the latest to join in at IQMP. The two start-ups will receive almost $100 million in state tax breaks, according to Capitol News Illinois. They, along with state leaders, hope to build what they call a National Quantum Algorithm Center, to put Illinois at the forefront of quantum computing.
Quantum computers, which potential IQMP tenants hope to develop for widespread use, function totally differently than conventional computers, down to their most basic units.
A digital computer uses bits, or binary digits, as its most basic building blocks. They can either be a 1 or a 0. These bits are combined in circuits to store data long-term, add and multiply numbers, and send messages across networks, creating the computers and internet we know. They allow us to browse Instagram on our phones and send emails. Every computer works like this. Quantum computers are different.
“If you think about a bit as being like a light switch, for example, it could be 1 or 0, it could be on or off—but it’s not both at the same time,” said Daniel Slichter, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. A theoretical quantum light switch, conversely, could exist in three states: on, off, or both on and off at the same time—a state quantum physicists call a “superposition.” “Things that obey the rules of quantum mechanics…the rules that we’re used to in our sort of everyday experience, some of them don’t apply,” Slichter said.
The quantum world functions very differently than how we understand the world to function, and quantum computers reflect that. A quantum computer at a fundamental level doesn’t work with just 1 or 0, but rather in units called quantum bits, or qubits, that aren’t just confined to either/or, but can encapsulate quantum superpositions like 1 and 0, or 1+0, or 10 percent of 0, or 90 percent of 1.
Slichter said that because quantum computers work in totally unprecedented ways, “there are certain ways in which you can use these weird quantum properties to be able to perform calculations that you would never be able to do with a regular, conventional computer.”
By tapping into the weirdness of the quantum world, scientists hope to design computers that can perform far more calculations—and do so much faster—than conventional computers can.
“There are problems that we seem to be able to solve, at least in theory, faster than we could do with any classical computer,” said Santiago Nunez-Corrales, Quantum Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Urbana-Champaign. “Faster doesn’t mean that the computer is going to run more quickly on every single step. It means that the algorithms you write allow you to move things that would take very, very long times into a fraction of the time.”
How does one build a quantum computer? That’s part of what researchers are still trying to determine.
“There’s lots of different ways that people are trying to make [a computer] that behaves in this quantum mechanical way, and each one has strengths and weaknesses,” Slichter said.
Slichter’s lab uses atoms trapped in a vacuum chamber. PsiQuantum is trying to build a computer using particles of light. Other labs use special circuits cooled to temperatures lower than those in deep space.
Light-based quantum computers work through a series of lasers, mirrors, and light detectors. One of the advantages of light-based quantum computers is that they don’t need to be cooled down to extremely low temperatures. Another is that there is more existing research on these types of quantum computers. Jiuzhang, a photon-based quantum computer developed by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China, performed a calculation impossible for a classical computer in 2020.
Building the largest quantum computer in the U.S., like the one that PsiQuantum is attempting to do, is itself an experiment—a potentially very lucrative one.
“If you’re going to invent a wholly new computer that’ll do things that you could never do before, it’s interesting for technology that you can do that, but also it can be, you know, worth a lot of money to be able to do something new,” said John Martinis, former head of Google’s Quantum Computing lab and co-founder of Qolab, a quantum computing startup.
But metrics that are handpicked by the entities doing the research only give you one part of the equation. For example, PsiQuantum’s metric of building the largest US-based quantum computing facility doesn’t necessarily mean it will be the best or the most efficient, according to Slichter. Quantum computers, like regular computers, have varying metrics by which they function and Slichter says that the massive size of a quantum computer like the one PsiQuantum is building doesn’t necessarily mean it will work better than others.
PsiQuantum did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who developed the field of quantum electrodynamics, gave talks at MIT in the early 1980s in which he proposed the idea of a quantum computer. It would be decades before anything similar to what Feynman proposed could be constructed in reality.
It’s only in the last two decades that scientists have brought those theories into labs and started to prove them through experimentation, usually at publicly funded research institutions. But in the past decade, companies such as Google, IBM, Amazon Web Services and myriad start-ups are investing in quantum computers with the promise that a greater understanding of quantum computing could yield huge profits. What remains in question is whether any of these lab experiments are bringing us closer to a functional quantum computer that can solve useful problems.
“There’s a lot of excitement. The excitement comes from a very legitimate, sort of scientific place,” said Bill Fefferman, an associate professor in the computer science department at University of Chicago. “But it also comes separately from a lot of hype that’s created by a lot of different actors that, in many cases, is not justified.”
The promise of the facility being built on the Southeast Side isn’t just that the quantum computer that could be developed there will succeed when others have failed. It’s that the problems this computer will solve can push the field further and reach critical benchmarks that people have only theorized about, such as using a quantum computer to break encryption.
Currently, encrypted messages, like those sent on WhatsApp or Signal, work by turning text into something indecipherable using a key (in this context, a very long number). While classical computers could figure out the right key by running through all the possibilities, they would need between thousands to hundreds of billions of years to do so. In theory, quantum computers could find the key—and therefore decipher your message—in a fraction of that time, some hours or even minutes. That could threaten everything from your bank passwords to your phone security. But this use for quantum computers is not going to happen anytime soon, according to Fefferman, who specializes in quantum computing and encryption.
“Eventually we have a sufficiently large-scale quantum computer, and again, the timeline is a bit uncertain, but we will certainly be able to use that quantum computer to break into essentially every type of encryption that’s used on the internet today,” Fefferman said. “On the other hand, that’s not a near term thing.”
The selection of Chicago isn’t a coincidence.
“Within Chicago and also within the greater Illinois area, there’s a bunch of people working on multiple different kinds of quantum computing technologies like this,” Slichter said. “It’s actually a rich area of research.”
Research universities such the University of Chicago, Northwestern, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and labs such as FermiLab and Argonne National Laboratory, are all invested in the promise of quantum computing.
Martinis described the influx of private and public dollars into the quest to create a functional quantum computer as a “space race”.
“The company, the country that first has access to this will obviously, have some advantages that are a little bit unforeseen,” Martinis said. These advantages could include the ability to break encryption, for example, or to use quantum sensing to detect stealth bombers. Martinis described the U.S. and China as major players in the race to develop a functional quantum computer.
There are also civilian applications for quantum computers.
“We don’t know all the things that [quantum computers] will be eventually useful for,” Slichter said, adding that there are some things scientists are hopeful about. “One is, let’s say you want to design a molecule. Maybe it’s a protein that helps cure some disease. Maybe it’s a molecule that helps you make fertilizer with less energy input. Anytime you’re trying to design something that’s a molecule or a protein, you’re dealing with a system that is inherently quantum mechanical.”
One thing about quantum computing that is clear is how uncertain its future is at the moment.
“There’s a lot of promise that is not yet realized and there are many different horses in this race, and PsiQuantum is one of them,” he said. “But it’s not clear that there’s a winner and a loser right now.”
Siri Chilukuri is a freelance journalist based in Chicago who reports on climate change, culture, politics, and labor. She also is a team lead at City Bureau where she helps emerging journalists sharpen their reporting and engagement skills.