U.S. officials aim to harness commercial partnerships as quantum technologies gain momentum
There’s a common refrain that often echoes across the frontiers of quantum sensing: You can’t hide from gravity. Anything with mass, however small, exerts a corresponding gravitational force. With the right quantum tools, detecting minute shifts in gravity fields can reveal hidden truths about objects, where they’re located and what anomalies they create.
Picture, for instance, scientists using such measurements to scour asteroids for rare metals, or hidden caverns on the moon and Mars that might be suitable for human settlement. Focused on Earth, quantum instruments could provide farmers with inch-by-inch insights into soil composition and moisture levels; miners with an ability to locate valuable minerals without ever visiting the site, and militaries with the kind of centimeter-level precision that could dramatically enhance navigation and surveillance.
“It’s an exciting prospect,” JT Janssen, chief scientist of the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom, told me. “We’ll measure more, and learn more,” including such cosmic enigmas as dark energy.
The promise of such technologies is what, in part, prompted the U.S. Department of Energy in January to announce a $71 million initiative in high-energy physics — something that Regina Rameika, the associate director of the agency’s Office of High Energy Physics, described as a path that could “[open] up new ways for us to understand and explore the universe.”
Plans call for funding a variety of projects that would be carried out over the next five years, including new experimental platforms for quantum technologies, such as entanglements — a phenomenon whereby particles are linked even when separated by large distances — as well as control of quantum states to more precisely track forces of gravity, among other phenemona.
Like much of this new era in space, DOE envisions commercial partnerships playing a prominent role — evidence, perhaps, of a maturing paradigm that Rima Kasia Oueid, senior commercialization executive at the Office of Technology Transitions, likened to a kind of “organically led Manhattan Project.”
Oueid, in this case, was referencing her agency’s Quantum in Space Collaboration, a public-private partnership meant to facilitate increased coordination between federal agencies, including NASA and the Pentagon, and the still-nascent quantum industry. The idea, she told me, was to find “like-minded people (and companies) that want to leverage these technologies.”
The department in January added five new companies to the program, signing memorandums of understanding with Boeing, Axiom Space, USRA, Vescent and Qrypt. Previous signatories include Accenture, Nebula and Infleqtion.
Those MOUs were signed amidst a broader effort by lawmakers to reauthorize a $2.7 billion national quantum initiative aimed at establishing new research centers and other facilities — an initiative that originally began under the first Trump administration, though whose future is uncertain amid recent government-wide staffing cuts.
Nevertheless, a bevy of companies are gearing up for what they hope will be surging federal interest in emerging quantum markets, according to Paul Stimers, who heads a quantum industry group working to advance U.S. quantum leadership, and who has called for the appointment of a quantum czar to consolidate such efforts.
Among those companies is the Colorado-based Infleqtion, formerly known as Cold Quanta, which developed instruments for NASA’s Cold Atom Lab aboard the International Space Station, which has been carrying out experiments with ultra-cold atoms since 2018.
That facility, which is similar to one aboard China’s Tiangong station in low-Earth orbit, was considered more of a test case for a broader project in the works by Infleqtion and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In that mission, an instrument known as a quantum gravity gradiometer (QGG) pathfinder, comprised of two spatially separated atom interferometers, is to be mounted aboard an Earth-orbiting satellite as a “downward looking instrument” to continuously map aquifers, oil and gas reserves, and other natural phenomena, according to Max Perez, Infleqtion vice president of strategic initiatives. The instrument could also potentially detect underground structures for national security purposes, he explained, such as cross-border tunnels.
“That mission is now entering the hardware phase,” Perez told me, with NASA target a launch date of no earlier than 2030.
Using lasers and the wave-like properties of atoms, specifically laser-cooled atoms placed into superposition, atom interferometers are used to extract detailed information about gravitational variations, density anomalies, magnetic fields and other features otherwise concealed from more classical sensors, such as laser ranging interferometers. LRIs, by contrast, measure the changes in distance between two spacecraft as they move through different parts of Earth’s gravity field. While LRIs rely on quantum principles, such as the behavior of light, they are not classified as fully quantum devices. (Such measurements are in fact already performed on orbit, including through a U.S.-German collaboration aimed at deciphering changes in ice sheets, glaciers and sea levels.)
The development of more sophisticated quantum sensors could not only radically improve measurements in terms of speed and sensitivity but also could — unlike their classical counterparts — benefit from being “self-calibrating,” Janssen explained. Given that these sensors operate by exploiting quantum states thought to be extremely stable and predictable, self-calibration is particularly useful when operating in space, where repairs and recalibrations can be difficult, if not impossible. As an added benefit, microgravity reduces noise, while the frigid temperatures improve instrument performance and allow for longer measurement times.
“I expect that space-based atom interferometry will lead to exciting new discoveries and fantastic quantum technologies impacting everyday life and will transport us into a quantum future,” said Nick Bigelow, a professor at the University of Rochester in New York and Cold Atom Lab principal investigator, in a statement following last year’s test case aboard the ISS.
Related Posts
