- The Trump administration’s 2021 budget request contains $237 million in funding to support quantum information research.
- Quantum information science harnesses the behavior of particles to make calculations in fundamentally new ways.
- Prototype networks exist in New York and Chicago, and researchers are developing the new technologies needed to create longer links.
In the 1960s the U.S. government funded a series of experiments developing techniques to shuttle information from one computer to another. Devices in single labs sprouted connections, then neighboring labs linked up. Soon the network had blossomed between research institutions across the country, setting down the roots of what would become the internet and transforming forever how people use information. Now, 60 years later, the Department of Energy is aiming to do it again.
The Trump administration’s 2021 budget request — currently under consideration by Congress — proposes slashing the overall funding for scientific research by nearly 10% but boosts spending on quantum information science by about 20%, to $237 million. Of that, the DOE has requested $25 million to accelerate the development of a quantum internet. Such a network would leverage the counterintuitive behavior of nature’s particles to manipulate and share information in entirely new ways, with the potential to reinvent fields including cybersecurity and material science.
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