Building a quantum future

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The UK's National Quantum Computing Centre aims to create a collaborative working environment for building prototype quantum machines and developing innovative applications

physicsworld.com, Sept. 20, 2021 – 

Construction will soon be starting on the world’s first national laboratory to be dedicated to quantum computing. With funding of £93m over the next five years, the primary objective of the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) is to accelerate the scale-up and exploitation of practical quantum computers. The NQCC will be built in Harwell, Oxfordshire, alongside several other top-tier scientific facilities operated by the Science and Facilities Technology Council (STFC), and is due to open in 2023.

One of the NQCC’s key deliverables is to demonstrate a quantum computer with more than 100 qubits by 2025, which means that the NQCC team has already started to commission its first tranche of R&D projects. “The building is important, but we couldn’t wait for it to be finished because the technology is evolving rapidly and our international competitors and collaborators are moving forward at pace,” says the NQCC’s director Michael Cuthbert. “We need to do something tangible, to get started with some development work that we can learn from and that will shape our future technology programme.”

The initial objectives and priorities for the NQCC have emerged from a detailed technology roadmap developed by around 20 of the UK’s leading quantum experts over the last two years. The roadmap highlights current activities in quantum computing, identifies the key strengths of the UK’s quantum community, and evaluates the maturity of different technology platforms and their potential over the next 10 years. Cuthbert and his team have now translated the outcomes of that roadmap into a series of work packages across software, hardware and application development that are now being awarded competitively to both academic and industrial partners.

The NQCC is fortunate to have access to a thriving quantum community of research groups and start-up companies, as well as larger industrial organizations that could become important end-users for future quantum computers. That collaborative ecosystem has been fostered in large part by the UK’s National Programme for Quantum Technologies, which has supported technology hubs in quantum sensing, imaging, communications and computing since 2014. While the UK is traditionally seen as strong in academic research but weaker on commercial exploitation, Cuthbert points out that this co-ordinated activity has already spawned 41 start-up companies that are already capitalizing on the emerging market for quantum technologies. “Between them they have raised more than £135m in investment funding,” he says. “They are developing robust business models and making international connections that could enable them to become the major global players of the future.”

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