 Go! There's a race and everything's at stake. It's dire at this particular point in time that we have to come out. The winners in this particular quantum race in order to maintain our position of superiority. Quantum physics is the holy grail of military and battlefield technology. There's a lot of possibilities and therefore there's a lot of dangers. And our biggest near-peer adversaries know it. China is coming out with networks where they're showing that they can send secure information at this point. So there's a lot of stuff that's going all over. China is making huge strides in quantum research. If they get it first, it's certainly going to be detrimental to our efforts. The Air Force cares. The DoD cares. All because ultimately, fundamentally, this is going to be a disruptive technology. With classical physics, scientists understand well how the world works from planets and their orbits to an F-22 on a surveillance mission. Our technology up to now has depended largely on classical physics. So quantum behaves very differently than classical physics or classical mechanics and so it allows us to do new things. These new things all come from a rapidly growing area of science called quantum physics. It's the fundamental theory that describes the behavior of our physical world but on an atomic or molecular scale. So quantum can make an impact across any domain. It has got to be determined what that impact is going to be. Scientists at the Air Force Research Lab are busy studying quantum physics and nearly all their research revolves around understanding three unique quantum properties. Entanglement, superposition and coherence. The promise of quantum technology will ultimately use or exploit one, some or all of these quantum properties in some way. But what's so powerful and holds so much promise within this little known and unproven area of science? So quantum is a relatively young field in terms of physics but the payoff could be huge so it has the potential to be a highly disruptive technology and that's because it's not anything like anything we know about, right? We've never encountered phenomena like this before where you can have these strange things like entanglement that can act over very long distances and so for the Air Force purposes they're interested in quantum and timing, sensing, networking and computing and so for computing you can get advantages like exponentially faster computation for some problems. The prize Air Force scientists have their eye on? A quantum compass a pilot can use to determine his or her position without the need for global positioning satellites. Researchers hope to create a quantum compass by analyzing how lasers interact with defects in materials like diamond. These quantum interactions tell scientists what electromagnetic fields are present, fields that are mapped and known. Using this information pilots will be able to tell with incredible accuracy where they are at any given time. Someone was to jam the GPS or make it not available we would still be able to fly our missions. Another aspect of quantum mechanics is entanglement. When two particles are entangled they can travel as far apart from one another as the east is from the west. They could be galaxies apart and when something happens to one particle you will immediately be able to tell in the other. Outcomes of past wars have been determined based on the reliability of a nation's secure communications and this is another aspect of warfare quantum promises to disrupt. If you think of the battle of Midway in the Pacific the United States had the element of surprise in that battle because we were able to intercept and decrypt Japanese transmissions that indicated that they were going to attack Midway. If Japan for example had had a quantum network with big quantum encrypted transmissions it's possible we wouldn't have been able to decrypt those messages and we wouldn't have had the element of surprise and it might not have been the turning point that it ended up being. Through quantum entanglement the integrity of messages can be irrefutably determined. For the first time ever communications would be completely secure with a hundred percent assurity. Another quantum property scientists are working to understand and use is called superposition. Superposition could catapult computing in exponential ways by solving problems that have been up to now very difficult for traditional computers. That's because traditional computers use bits much like the heads or tails of a coin. You could look at one side of the coin and it's easy to determine which side you have. What's the measurement that you have when the coin's flipping in the air? It's actually both. It's a superposition state of heads and tails and the measurement is when you grab it. It's taking all possible routes at one time and so therefore you have this massive parallelism that's occurring in terms of it. So when we deal with this superposition of states it's not doing the head state or the tail states it's doing them both simultaneously. This means all possible solutions for a problem can be determined at once. It could prove invaluable for planning and logistics determining the most efficient way to distribute equipment, supplies, whatever a very demanding Air Force requires. Materials and drug synthesis are two other areas scientists are excited about that could benefit from superposition and quantum computing where drugs or materials can be synthesized and tested by the computer without ever being produced in real life. As we start looking at different drugs or different molecules, polymers one of the examples that comes right to mind is polymers. Polymers are huge long chains of carbon or other materials and because of that the computation resources is massive on them. So anywhere where you can actually encode larger information spaces of processing power you win and quantum allows you to do that if the systems are entangled. Bringing it all together is coherence which has to do with all the elements of a quantum system being in sync with one another. As a quantum system evolves in time its coherence is essentially the preservation of the information stored in that quantum system. So a perfectly coherent quantum system would forever maintain the information that's been encoded in it. On the other hand, on the flip side of that there's a process called decoherence which is the process by which a quantum system loses its coherence over time due to uncontrolled interactions with the outside world with other systems. There's still a lot that needs to happen before quantum will be ready for prime time. This is partially because in order to study quantum mechanics scientists need a lot of non-quantum equipment amplifiers, vacuum tubes and temperature controllers. The list changes with the needs of the research and is critical to the knowledge discovery process. So in our case we use trapped ions, I said that before but to manipulate them we use lasers and so you have to have the laser set to a very particular frequency and it has to be stable enough to be able to perform the operation you're doing and so it's all these enabling technologies that need to be able to work together to get even a single qubit within a network or a computer to be able to operate. Domain dominance belongs to the first nation able to unlock the secrets of quantum physics and who that winner will be as of now is unknown but one thing is certain tomorrow's wars are being fought in today's physics labs.