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The Physics of Quantum Information

John Preskill
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, California Institute of Technology
arXiv:2208.08064v1 [quant-ph] 17 Aug 2022

AWS Center for Quantum Computing

Pasadena, California 91125, USA

Rapid ongoing progress in quantum information science makes this an apt time for a
Solvay Conference focused on The Physics of Quantum Information. Here I review four
intertwined themes encompassed by this topic: Quantum computer science, quantum
hardware, quantum matter, and quantum gravity. Though the time scale for broad
practical impact of quantum computation is still uncertain, in the near future we can
expect noteworthy progress toward scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing, and dis-
coveries enabled by programmable quantum simulators. In the longer term, controlling
highly complex quantum matter will open the door to profound scientific advances and
powerful new technologies.

Overview talk at the 28th Solvay Conference on Physics

“The Physics of Quantum Information”
Brussels, 19-21 May 2022

1. Introduction
This Solvay Conference on Physics provides a welcome opportunity to assess recent
scientific progress and to reflect on the challenges and opportunities before us.
Solvay Conferences had a stirring influence on advances in quantum physics during
the 20th century, going back to the very first in 1911. Those advances transformed
our understanding of nature, and also led the way to remarkable technologies such
as lasers, atomic clocks, magnetic resonance imaging, and billions of transistors on
a single microchip.
Such technologies, though undeniably impressive and impactful, barely scratch
the surface of how quantum theory reshapes our view of what’s possible in the
universe. Now, for the first time in human history, we are developing and perfecting
the tools to create and precisely control very complex states of many interacting
particles, states so complex that we cannot efficiently simulate them with our most
powerful existing computers or anticipate their behavior using currently known
theoretical ideas. As our ability to control the quantum world matures, profound
scientific discoveries and powerful technologies will surely ensue.
The rapidly unfolding developments in quantum information science make now a
particularly apt time for a Solvay Conference on The Physics of Quantum Informa-
tion. This topic encompasses four intertwined themes to be targeted in subsequent
sessions: Quantum computer science, 1,2 quantum hardware, 3,4 quantum matter, 5,6
and quantum gravity. 7,8 For each theme I will provide some historical background,
then comment on the current status and future prospects.
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2. Background
Modeling computation
The fundamental theory of computation builds on foundations erected by Turing in
the 1930s. 9 Turing defined a computation in terms of an idealized physical process
involving manipulation of symbols on a movable tape, and his model became widely
accepted as a correct characterization of functions that are in principle computable
in the physical world, an assertion known as the Church-Turing thesis.
A more refined notion, efficient computation, drew attention in the 1970s, ignit-
ing the theory of computational complexity. 10–12 It became accepted that a problem
can be solved efficiently if the number of steps on a Turing machine scales like a
polynomial in the size of the input to the problem, the so-called extended Church-
Turing thesis. By broad consensus, these are the problems that are feasible to solve
in practice. They are said to belong to a complexity class called P, for polynomial
time.
Problems in the complexity class NP are those such that a solution, once found,
can be efficiently verified by a Turing machine, and it’s generally believed that
NP contains hard problems that are outside P. It was noticed that a large family
of problems, like combinatorial optimization problems, are in a class called NP-
complete – these may be regarded as the hardest problems in the class NP. 10–12
We believe that NP also contains problems outside P which are not NP-complete.
Finding the prime factors of a large composite integer is a famous problem thought
to be of this type.
As a practical application of complexity theory, public key cryptosystems were
proposed in the 1970s, based on problems like factoring that are outside P but not
NP-complete. 13,14 These schemes are heavily used today to protect the privacy of
electronic communication, and are based on the presumption that a computation
that could break the protocol is too hard to carry out in practice.

Quantifying information
Information theory builds on foundations erected by Shannon in the 1940s. 15 Shan-
non quantified the information conveyed by a message according to how much the
message could be compressed to fewer bits without any loss of content. He also quan-
tified how much information can be transmitted from sender to receiver through a
noisy communication channel such that the information can be decoded with neg-
ligible probability of error by the receiver.
This theory led to the notion of an error-correcting code which can protect
redundantly encoded information against the damaging effects of noise; 16 this in
turn led to results establishing that computations can be performed reliably even
when the computing hardware is imperfect. 17 Error-correcting codes are also vitally
important in modern communication systems, like mobile phone cellular networks.
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Quantum information
The origins of quantum information theory can be traced back to observations by
Einstein and collaborators in the 1930s, 18 who noticed that correlations among
parts of a quantum system can have counterintuitive properties, a phenomenon
called “quantum entanglement” by Schrödinger. 19 John Bell formalized this notion
in the 1960s 20 by establishing that players who share quantum entanglement can win
a cooperative game with a higher success probability if they share entangled qubits
as opposed to classically correlated bits. 21,22 In this sense quantum entanglement
is a valuable resource that can be consumed to perform useful tasks.
In the 70s and 80s it was recognized that quantum communication, for exam-
ple by sending photons through optical fiber or free space, can be advantageous in
cryptography, as security can be based on principles of quantum physics rather than
limitations on the computational resources available to potential adversaries. 23–25
The crucial principle is that unknown quantum states, in contrast to classical bits,
cannot be copied accurately, 26,27 and in fact acquiring information about the con-
tent of quantum signals produces an unavoidable disturbance which is in principle
detectable.
Also in the 70s, the general theory of measuring and processing quantum states
was developed, including fundamental limits on how much classical information can
be acquired when a quantum system is measured. 28,29

Quantum computation
That properties of a complex highly correlated quantum system of many particles
are hard to compute is an old observation already known to the pioneers of quan-
tum mechanics. In the early 1980s, Feynman 30 and Manin 31 articulated the idea
that properties that are hard to calculate with a conventional computer might be
easy if we compute with a quantum device instead. This gave rise to a revision
of the extended Church-Turing thesis, which in its revised form can be informally
stated as, “A quantum computer can efficiently simulate any process that occurs in
nature.” 32 It is now widely believed, though not proven from first principles, that
quantum computers have an exponential advantage over conventional computers
for some problems, potentially including problems of interest in chemistry and ma-
terials science. That is, computations that can be performed in a time that scales
polynomially with system size using a quantum computer require a time that scales
exponentially using a conventional computer.
It was also found theoretically that quantum algorithms have a superpolyno-
mial advantage over the best known classical algorithms for problems of interest in
modern cryptography, such as finding the prime factors of a large composite inte-
ger. 33–35 In addition, it is known that quantum computers can speed up exhaustive
search for a solution to a combinatorial optimization problem, but in that case the
speedup is quadratic, meaning that the quantum time to solution scales like the
square root of the classical time. 36,37
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What is a quantum computer?

A mathematical model of an ideal quantum computer was formulated, the quantum
circuit model, which has these five essential ingredients. 38 (1) A physical system
harboring many qubits, such that the qubit number can be scaled upward as needed
to solve problems of increasing size. (2) The ability to prepare simple standard
initial states of the qubits, in effect to cool the system to a state with low entropy.
(3) A universal set of entangling quantum operations, called quantum gates, each
acting on two or more qubits, universal meaning that by composing many such gates
in succession we can approximate arbitrary unitary transformations acting on many
qubits. (4) A classical computer that efficiently translates a problem into a suitable
circuit of quantum gates. And (5) the ability to measure qubits in a standard basis
to read out classical bits providing the result of the computation. The efficiently
solvable problems are those that can be solved with high success probability using
a number of quantum gates that scales polynomially with the problem’s input size.
Other physically reasonable models of quantum computation were also studied,
such as the topological 39,40 and adiabatic 41,42 models, and shown to be equivalent
to the quantum circuit model, thus lending further support to the quantum version
of the extended Church-Turing thesis.
One should appreciate that all the features of the quantum circuit model can be
simulated by an conventional classical computer, if equipped by a random number
generator to capture the nondeterministic nature of the final quantum measure-
ment. All the classical computer needs to do is keep track of a vector in a Hilbert
space as we act on the vector with a sequence of matrices. For the final readout, it
projects the vector onto a standard set of axes, and assign probabilities to the dif-
ferent measurement outcomes accordingly. Since a (randomized) classical computer
can do whatever a quantum computer does, there is no difference in computability
— whatever is computable by a quantum computer is computable by a classical
computer as well.
The important distinction between the quantum and classical models is all about
efficiency. In general, for the classical computer to simulate the quantum computer,
it has to deal with vectors in a space whose dimension is exponential in the number
of qubits. For the hardest problem instances, all known classical methods for doing
this simulation require resources that scale exponentially with the number of qubits.

Quantum hardware
After the discovery of Shor’s factoring algorithm in 1994, interest in quantum com-
puting exploded, igniting pursuit of possible approaches to constructing hardware
that could meet the five criteria enumerated above, at least to a reasonable ap-
proximation. And it was noticed that some technologies that were already being
developed for other reasons could be adapted for the purpose of coherent quantum
information processing.
For example, motivated by the quest for more precise clocks, tools had been
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developed for cooling and manipulating individual electrically charged atoms using
laser fields, which led to ion-trap quantum processors. 43,44 Josephson junctions,
nonlinear elements in superconducting circuits which were being used in high preci-
sion magnetometers, led to superconducting quantum processors. 45–47 Experience
with nanoscale electrical circuits resulted in the ability to isolate and manipulate
spins of single electrons. 48,49 High efficiency sources and detectors for single photons
opened the possibility of processors based on photonics. 50 Methods for trapping and
cooling neutral atoms led to tunable simulations of strongly interacting quantum
matter. 51,52 Later, optical tweezers provided an opportunity to build programmable
simulators based on arrays of highly excited neutral atoms. 53–56 These and other
approaches to quantum hardware are still being developed and are steadily advanc-
ing.
Currently the two most advanced quantum computing technologies are ion
traps 3,57 and superconducting circuits. 4,58 In an ion trap, each qubit is a single
electrically charged atom, which can be in either its ground state or a long-lived
excited state. Tens of qubits can be stored in a linear array, and the state prepa-
ration, readout, and single-qubit quantum gates can all be achieved by addressing
an ion with a stable laser. To perform entangling two-qubit gates, one manipulates
the normal modes of vibration of ions in the trap using laser fields — a two-qubit
gate can be executed on any pair of ions in tens of microseconds.
To scale up to larger systems, one envisions modular trapping regions, connected
together by optical interconnects or by shuttling ions from one trapping region to
another.
In a superconducting quantum computer, of order 100 qubits can be arranged in
a two-dimensional array, with nearest-neighbor couplings among the qubits. These
qubits, called transmons, are in effect artificial atoms that must be carefully fab-
ricated and frequently calibrated. One reads out a transmon by coupling it to a
microwave resonator, and single-qubit quantum gates are executed by addressing
the qubit with microwave pulses. Two-qubit gates can be performed by various
means, for example by tuning the frequencies of a pair of qubits into and out of
resonance, or by driving one qubit at the frequency of another. A two-qubit gate
takes tens of nanoseconds.
For scaling up to larger systems, one must address the challenge of dealing
with many microwave control lines, and to improve gate fidelities, better materials,
fabrication quality, and possibly alternative qubit designs would all be helpful.
By now, quantum processors have advanced to the stage where they can perform
tasks that are challenging to simulate using classical computers. In particular, one
can sample from the output probability distribution of randomly chosen circuits
with 60 qubits and over 20 cycles of entangling two-qubit gates. 59–61 Though this
specific task is not of intrinsic practical interest, such experiments have been useful,
by providing new benchmarks for circuit fidelity, solidifying our understanding of the
global features of circuit noise, and provoking improvements in classical simulation
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methods. 62

Quantum error correction

When Shor’s algorithm was discovered, and interest in quantum computing surged,
there was widespread and understandable skepticism regarding whether large-scale
quantum computing would ever be practical. 63–65 Quantum systems have the incon-
venient property that observing a quantum state inevitably disturbs the state in an
uncontrolled way, so interactions with the environment cause quantum information
to decay rapidly, a phenomenon called decoherence. To execute a quantum com-
putation reliably we must keep the information we process nearly perfectly isolated
from the outside world to prevent decoherence, which is quite difficult because our
hardware can never be perfect.
It was quickly discovered that, at least in principle, hardware imperfections
can be overcome with suitable software based on what we call quantum error-
correcting codes. 66–69 The crucial idea is that we can protect quantum information
by storing it nonlocally, encoding it in a very highly entangled form such that when
the environment interacts with the parts of the system locally, it acquires negligible
information about the encoded quantum state and so need not damage the state.
Furthermore, we learned how to process efficiently quantum information that is
encoded in this highly entangled way. 70 It follows that, if errors in a quantum
computer are sufficiently rare and not too strongly correlated, we can simulate an
ideal quantum computation efficiently using a noisy quantum computer. 71–77
The most promising protocol for error-corrected quantum computing in the rel-
atively near term is based on Kitaev’s surface code, 78 which has two advantages: it
can tolerate a relatively high physical error rate, 79–81 and it requires only geomet-
rically local processing in a two-dimensional layout. Even so, the overhead cost of
error correction, in both the number of physical qubits needed and the number of
physical gates, is quite daunting. One can plausibly anticipate running algorithms
for a few hundred protected logical qubits that would surpass the best conventional
computers for some problems of practical interest, but to achieve sufficiently reli-
ability the number of physical qubits might be in the millions. That’s a big leap
from the devices we expect to have in the next few years, with hundreds of physical
qubits.

Quantum matter
Deep connections between quantum information and quantum matter emerged
with the discovery of topological order 82 (initially in fractional quantum Hall sys-
tems 83,84 ), which we now recognize as a manifestation of long-range entanglement
in a quantum phase of matter. 85 By long-range entanglement, we mean that the
time needed to prepare the quantum phase, using spatially local operations in a
quantum computer and starting with an unentangled state, scales with the total
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size of the system. Furthermore, topologically ordered phases of matter may be

fruitfully viewed as quantum error-correcting codes which conceal nonlocally en-
coded quantum information. 78 Symmetry-protected topological phases were also
discovered, 86–88 for which the time to prepare the quantum state scales with sys-
tem size if all local operations in the quantum circuit are required to satisfy specified
symmetries.
It was discovered that ground states of quantum systems often obey an entangle-
ment “area law,” meaning that the amount of entanglement between the particles
inside and outside of a specified ball-shaped region scales not like the total number
of particles in the region, but rather like the number of particles near the boundary
of the region. 89–91 This led to new methods for simulating quantum many-body
systems on classical computers based on tensor networks, which exploit this entan-
glement structure to improve substantially on previous methods. 92–95 And it was
noticed that entanglement, when quantified by the entropy of the marginal quan-
tum state for the particles in a region, has universal properties that can be used to
identify distinct quantum phases of matter. 96–98
The computational hardness of preparing quantum ground states was studied,
and it was argued convincingly that in some cases this is a hard problem for quan-
tum computers; 99 this hardness can persist even for translationally invariant one-
dimensional systems, 100 though admittedly such computationally intractable quan-
tum many-body systems may have exotic interactions that are not necessarily of
practical physical interest. At any rate, according to the quantum extended Church-
Turing thesis, these ground states that are intractable for quantum computers could
not arise in nature by any feasible physical process.
Quantum information has also provided a fresh perspective on the behavior of
strongly chaotic quantum systems, which we now view through the lens of entan-
glement dynamics. 101 Information that is imprinted locally on a quantum system
quickly spreads, becoming encoded in the form of quantum entanglement shared by
many particles, and hence invisible to local observers who have access to just a few
particles at a time. This entanglement spreading can be efficiently simulated by
quantum computers, 102 but is beyond the reach of known classical computational
methods, which cannot succinctly encode or efficiently simulate highly entangled
many-particle quantum states.

Quantum gravity
The connection between quantum gravity and quantum information can be traced
back to Hawking’s 1974 discovery that due to quantum effects black holes emit
thermal radiation, arising because of quantum entanglement between the inside
and outside of the black hole’s event horizon. 103 This led to a quantitative rela-
tionship between the area of the event horizon and the black hole’s entropy, 104 a
measure of how much quantum information the black hole can store. These results
anticipated the area law for entanglement entropy in condensed matter physics that
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would be discovered years later. Furthermore, the entropy of a black hole is aston-
ishingly large — for example, the entropy of a solar mass black hole, which is just
a few kilometers across, is 20 orders of magnitude larger than the entropy of the
sun. Indeed black holes, though remarkably simple objects as described by classi-
cal gravitation theory, 105,106 are quantum-mechanically the most complex objects
nature allows, as quantified by the black hole’s information storage capacity.
Holographic duality, discovered in the 1990s, established that, at least in nega-
tively curved anti-de Sitter space, quantum gravity in bulk quantum spacetime is
equivalent to a nongravitational quantum field theory in one lower dimension that
resides on the boundary of the spacetime. 107 And it turned out that the bulk geome-
try is encoded on the boundary by the structure of the quantum entanglement in the
boundary theory. 108 Furthermore, the holographic dictionary which maps local bulk
observables to the corresponding highly nonlocal observables on the boundary was
recognized as the encoding map of a kind of quantum error-correcting code. 109,110
So we can regard the geometry of spacetime itself as an emergent feature arising
from underlying quantum entanglement, which is intrinsically robust with respect
to some deformations of the boundary theory.
The entanglement dynamics of black holes was studied, and it was conjectured
that black holes are the most efficient scramblers of quantum information that
nature will allow. 111,112 Here, too, studies of information scrambling that originated
in studies of black hole physics stirred growing interest in how information becomes
scrambled in other quantum many-body systems that are more accessible in the
laboratory. 113–115
The entropy of the Hawking radiation emitted by an evaporating black hole,
which tracks the evolving quantum entanglement of the radiation with the hole, was
studied quantitatively, 116,117 and calculations confirmed that the entropy evolves
as expected if the evaporation process is correctly described by unitary quantum
theory. 118 Rather unexpectedly, this unitary behavior can be captured by semiclas-
sical computations without reference to the microscopic details of quantum gravity.
Such results indicate that black hole physics is profoundly nonlocal; one can in
principle access the black hole interior by manipulating radiation that is far away,
but only by performing quantum operations which are of such high computational
complexity as to be infeasible in practice. 119

Connections
The discussion so far has already illustrated the many cross-connections among the
scientific themes that are represented at this conference. For example, information
scrambling is now studied in quantum computing circuits, in chaotic many-particle
systems, and in black holes. Quantum error correction, introduced for the purpose
of extending quantum computing to large systems, is also relevant to topological
phases of matter, and to the holographic correspondence in quantum gravity. Com-
putational complexity, the study of the hardness of computational problems, turns
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out to be relevant to preparation of topological quantum phases of matter, and also

to the geometry of the black hole interior. These are a few examples among many
such connections.

3. Status and prospects

Where are we now?
Coming back to quantum computing technology, what is the status today? There
are two central questions about quantum computing, which could already have been
articulated 40 years ago. How will we scale up to quantum computing systems that
can solve hard problems? And how can we best make use of that computational
power in science and in industry? In my view, both questions are wide open. How
we direct our effort should be guided by that realization.
One may ask, what should we do with the noisy intermediate-scale quantum
computers that we have now? 120 Two obvious answers are: We should use near-
term quantum computers to learn how to build more powerful quantum computers
that can have a practical impact. And we should seek a clearer understanding of
how those practical quantum computers can eventually be used.
Even if broadly useful quantum computers are still a ways off, much can be
accomplished over the next five years or so. In that time frame we can expect to see
encouraging progress toward scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing. And we
can anticipate scientific discoveries enabled by programmable quantum simulators
and circuit-based quantum computers.

Progress toward quantum error correction

What would constitute notable progress toward fault-tolerant quantum computing?
We need to be able to do repeated rounds of accurate error syndrome measurement
for quantum error correction. And we would like to see concrete evidence that
quantum memory times continue to improve sharply as we include more and more
physical qubits to encode each protected logical qubit.
The ion trappers could justifiably protest that they don’t care very much about
quantum memory times, because their atomic qubits already have extraordinarily
long lifetimes. That’s true. But for all currently foreseen platforms it is crucial
to achieve much higher fidelity for entangling two-qubit logical gates — only then
will we be able to run powerful quantum algorithms. What we may hope to see in
the near term are logical two-qubit gates, protected by quantum error correction,
with much higher fidelity than our best physical two-qubit gates, as well as solid
evidence that logical gate fidelities continue to improve sharply as the code block
increases in size. That has not yet been accomplished.
What is the status now? There has been exciting recent progress toward quan-
tum error correction; I’ll highlight two contributions, one from Google and one from
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Honeywell (now called Quantinuum).a

Google investigated the quantum repetition code, using up to 21 qubits in the
Sycamore processor, 11 in the code block and 10 ancilla qubits for error syndrome
readout. 121 Importantly, this is not a full-fledged quantum error-correcting code —
it protects against dephasing errors but not against bit flips. Nonetheless, it was
an impressive demonstration. They did up to 50 consecutive rounds of syndrome
measurement, each taking about 1 microsecond, with most of that time devoted to
resetting the ancilla qubits to prepare for the next round of syndrome measurement.
They observed that the rate of logical errors due to dephasing decreased by about
a factor of 10 each time the code distance increased by 4, for example as the code
length increased from 3 to 7 and from 7 to 11. That was in accord with expectations
given the noise in their device.
Quantinuum demonstrated error correction for a 7-qubit code that can correct an
arbitrary error acting on any one qubit out of the 7. 122 They did up to 6 consecutive
rounds of error correction, each taking 200 milliseconds. Note the much different
cycle times for the superconducting and ion trap devices. As quantum computing
advances, and the time on the wall clock for running an algorithm becomes an
increasingly important consideration, that difference may loom large. Quantinuum
uses an architecture in which ions are transported to processing zones where rather
high fidelity operations can be performed in parallel, and after movement they use
another ion species to sympathetically cool the motional state. That cooling enables
them to do the repeated rounds of syndrome measurement, but also accounts for
much of the time budget of their circuit.
Unfortunately, gate error rates in the Google and Honeywell machines, and other
current devices, 123,124 are still too high for quantum error correction to improve
two-qubit logical gate fidelities.

Fault-tolerance with the surface code

The best currently known prospect for scaling up quantum computing in the rela-
tively near term is based on the surface code, introduced by Alexei Kitaev over 25
years ago. 78 As already noted, the two great virtues of the surface code are that
error syndromes can be extracted using only geometrically local processing in a
two-dimensional layout, and that each syndrome bit can be read out using a simple
quantum circuit involving only four data qubits. As a result, the surface code can
tolerate higher error rates than other feasible quantum codes. 79–81
Despite being more effective than other codes, error correction with the surface
code still carries a rather hefty overhead cost in the number of qubits and gates
needed. Let’s suppose we can do physical controlled-NOT gates with an error
rate of .1%. That’s better than we have now in multiqubit devices, but might

a This discussion reflects progress that had already been reported at the time of the Solvay Con-
ference in May 2022.
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plausibly be reached in the near future. Perhaps we will start to see quantum
advantage using circuits with hundreds of protected qubits and millions of high-
fidelity quantum (Toffoli) gates. To execute those circuits, we’re likely to need at
least tens of thousands of physical qubits. For breaking public key cryptosystems
using Shor’s algorithm, it is estimated that 20 million physical qubits are needed. 125
If we can somehow do controlled-NOT gates with four 9s of fidelity, an improvement
by another order of magnitude, that will reduce the overhead cost, but we’re still
likely to want at least hundreds of physical qubits per logical qubit to see significant
quantum advantage running algorithms we currently know about. These numbers
are surely daunting from the perspective of currently available technology.
In an exciting recent development, quantum codes have been discovered that are
far more efficient than the surface code. 2,126,127 Someday we might use these codes
to reduce significantly the overhead cost of fault-tolerant quantum computing. As
best we currently understand, though, to perform well these codes require much
lower physical error rates than the surface code, and so are not likely to be useful
until much better quantum hardware is available.

Much better gate error rates?

It would pay off handsomely to have much improved physical gate error rates in
quantum hardware, but that’s very hard to achieve. A particularly visionary pro-
posal is topological quantum computing, where qubits are encoded in an exotic ma-
terial that provides physical protection against noise. 128 High fidelity topologically
protected quantum gates, if realized, would be a genuine milestone for quantum
many-body physics, aside from any implications for future information technolo-
gies. Though the theoretical idea is compelling, up to now experimental progress
has been slow. 129
There are other potential ways to incorporate better protection against noise into
the hardware itself. Some promising ideas exploit precise manipulation of bosonic
modes, such as microwave resonators in superconducting circuits, harmonic motion
of trapped ions, or optical modes in photonic devices. For example, GKP-encoded
states of bosonic modes have a periodic grid structure in phase space, allowing slight
shifts in phase space to be corrected. 130–132 Bosonic cat codes use superpositions
of coherent states to provide strong protection against bit flips, resulting in highly
biased physical noise that can be corrected by quantum codes at a reduced overhead
cost. 133–135 Fluxonium qubits 136,137 and zero-pi qubits 138,139 use strong nonlinear-
ity resulting from large inductance in a superconducting circuit to suppress noise.
In the arena of superconducting qubits, all of these schemes are more complex than
the relatively simple transmon; they are still at a comparatively early stage, and we
can’t say yet how they’ll pan out. But it is important to continue pursuing these
and other challenging approaches offering the potential for a leap forward in per-
formance, because significantly lower physical gate error rates will bring us closer
to useful applications of quantum computation.
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Creating quantum states of matter

The quantum technology we already have is exciting, as it provides new tools for
exploring the physics of many entangled particles. On this front, too, we’ve seen
significant recent progress, including unprecedented studies of new quantum phases
of matter. I’ll highlight two examples.
The Harvard/MIT group, using a Rydberg atom platform with 219 qubits, re-
cently created and detected a novel highly entangled phase of quantum matter, a
quantum spin liquid. 140 Theorists have speculated about quantum spin liquids for
nearly 50 years, 141 but convincing experimental evidence for this type of quantum
state had never been seen before, for two main reasons. First, one needs a material
with suitable properties for qubits to seek a ground state with long-range quantum
entanglement. In nature, such materials seem to be rare. Second, the features of
a long-range-entangled state are very elusive to observe because one needs to make
collective observations on many qubits at once. The Rydberg platform is highly
programmable and sufficiently versatile to simulate the right kind of material. And
one can measure nonlocal observables with sufficient fidelity to identify signatures
of long-range entanglement.
Guided by university condensed matter physicists from Stanford, Princeton,
the Max Planck Institute and elsewhere, 20 superconducting qubits in the Google
Sycamore processor were used to create and observe a discrete time crystal. 142
This is a novel phase of matter in a periodically driven system, which oscillates
indefinitely at a frequency different from that of the periodic drive. The idea of
a time crystal had been suggested for the first time 10 years ago, 143 and there
had been previous experiments which were partially successful in validating the
phenomenon, 144–146 but the high fidelity gates and accurate single-qubit readout
and control in Sycamore made a more convincing demonstration possible.
Take note of two things. First, five years ago Rydberg atoms were not so much
on the radar screen of quantum platforms, yet now they are advancing rapidly.
That reminds us that we are still in the early days of quantum technology, and
big surprises may continue to arise. Second, the Google experiment was done on a
gate-based quantum computer, while the Harvard/MIT experiment was done in a
programmable analog mode. That reminds us that these two approaches to studying
quantum matter are complementary, and both are valuable to pursue.
These are encouraging signs that we’re acquiring tools to create and investigate
a variety of other new quantum phases of matter in the near future, both in equi-
librium like a quantum spin liquid, or driven far from equilibrium like a discrete
time crystal. There are good reasons to be impressed by these developments. First
because, of the applications of quantum computing that we currently foresee, those
to materials and chemistry are the ones that seem to have the greatest potential to
benefit humanity broadly speaking, and it’s exciting that we already have tools in
the current era that can advance our understanding of quantum matter. And second
because studies of topological phases could ignite new approaches to quantum error
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correction and fault tolerance that will pay off in the longer run. Looking ahead,
we can glimpse opportunities to create states of matter beyond what is known to
occur in nature, which can have both scientific and technological value.

Opportunities in quantum simulation

What will be the long term impact of quantum computing on society? No one
knows that. Nor should we be expected to envision clearly how quantum computing
might change the world. As I’ve said, of the applications we currently most clearly
foresee, what we imagine is most likely to broadly benefit humanity are applications
to chemistry and materials, which could improve human health, energy production,
agriculture, and the sustainability of our planet.
Can we be more concrete about that expected impact? That’s quite difficult
for several reasons. We seek applications of quantum computing that meet three
criteria. The problems of interest should be too hard to solve with conventional
computing, efficiently solvable by quantum computers, and the solutions should be
of scientific and/or practical value.
There are methods for simulating complex molecules and highly correlated ma-
terials using conventional computers which are actually rather good, and getting
better fast, not just because conventional computers are becoming more powerful,
but even more importantly because the classical algorithms are getting better. 5 For
computing properties of ground states and other low-energy states, the classical
methods are heuristic, without rigorous performance guarantees. But numerical
evidence suggests that the resources needed to obtain accurate results using clas-
sical methods such as those based on tensor networks and neural networks scale
reasonably with system size for typical molecules or materials that are of scientific
interest, because these systems are not so profoundly entangled. If that’s true, the
advantage enjoyed by quantum computers may scale polynomially rather that ex-
ponentially for such problems. 147 And the competing quantum methods are also
heuristic, because to obtain accurate results efficiently we must be able to prepare
states in the quantum computer that have a substantial overlap with the targeted
quantum states, which is not rigorously guaranteed. The general purpose method
for performing the state preparation task is the adiabatic method, which can be
very expensive in systems where there are multiple competing phases separated by
first-order phase transitions, as is often true in cases of interest.
Exponential quantum advantage can be expected in quantum simulation of dy-
namics, if we consider easily prepared initial excited states which become highly
entangled as they evolve, for example in highly inelastic collisions of fundamental
particles in a quantum field theory. 148 What scientific opportunities that may entail
is an issue worthy of further investigation.
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Challenges in quantum gravity

Circling back to quantum gravity, what are some of the challenges where we can
realistically expect to make substantial progress in the reasonably near future?
In the case of quantum gravity in anti-de Sitter space, we still lack a good handle
on why local quantum physics provides an excellent approximation on distance
scales that are small compared to the scale of the spatial curvature. In addition, the
spacetime we live in is not anti-de Sitter, and we need better tools for describing
quantum gravity in spacetimes that are asymptotically flat or positively curved.
Anti-de Sitter space has the convenient feature that spacetime has a boundary, and
we can define the observables of the theory by making reference to that boundary.
But de Sitter space, which is relevant to early-universe inflationary cosmology, does
not have that convenient feature, which makes quantum gravity in de Sitter space
intrinsically harder to think about.
Despite remarkable recent progress, 7,8 we don’t have an adequate way, in quan-
tum gravity, to describe the experience of an observer who falls into a black hole, and
we especially don’t know what happens to observers who encounter the singularity
in the black hole interior.
Holographic duality is very empowering, but we have analytic control over how
it works only in a limited number of special cases. Can we understand more sys-
tematically under what conditions a nongravitational boundary theory admits a
holographic dual which is useful for describing quantum gravitational phenomena?
And can we learn more concretely what resources we’ll need to simulate quantum
gravity with quantum computers, and compute observable properties of scientific
interest?

Quantum gravity: can experiments help?

Eventually, we might hope to make progress on some of these questions by using
quantum computers and quantum simulators; in particular, by simulating strongly-
coupled quantum many-body systems and leveraging holographic duality, we might
probe the dual quantum geometry by measuring features of quantum entanglement
on the boundary. We might, for example, learn about locality in the bulk spacetime
though linear response measurements that yield information about the commutators
of boundary observables. Studying the entanglement dynamics of strongly chaotic
systems can reveal how quantum information gets scrambled, which might unveil
signatures of string theory in the bulk. Or we might in other contexts be able
to measure quantum corrections to semiclassical gravity that would be hard to
compute analytically or by using classical computers. Simulations of very-high-
energy scattering in the bulk could be especially instructive.
Perhaps guidance from simulations can help us to grasp holographic dual de-
scriptions of spacetimes beyond anti-de Sitter space. And we may find that some
otherwise opaque features of strongly-coupled dynamics can be more easily inter-
preted using the lens of bulk quantum gravity. One already much studied example
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is a mysterious type of coherent quantum teleportation in the boundary theory

which has a quite natural alternative interpretation in terms of quantum informa-
tion transmitted through a traversable spatial wormhole in the bulk theory. 149–152

4. Some things I haven’t mentioned

There are some important things I have not yet had time to mention in this talk,
of which I list four here.
The discovery of Shor’s algorithm will have a disruptive effect on electronic
commerce, as the public key cryptosystems we now rely on to protect our privacy
will no longer be secure when powerful quantum computers are readily available.
The world is responding by developing new classical cryptosystems that are widely
believed to be resistant to attack by quantum computers. 153 It will be a necessary
task, but a prolonged and expensive one, to deploy these new systems.
An alternative approach to protecting our privacy is to distribute secure private
keys through quantum communication, presumably by sending photons through
optical fiber or free space. 24,25 Here the security rests on principles of quantum
physics, rather than assumptions about the computational power of our adver-
saries, and in fact there are protocols which are provably secure even if we don’t
trust the equipment we use to distribute the key. 154 It’s not clear to what extent the
world will demand quantum cryptography for secure communication; in any event,
quantum key distribution on a global scale will require new technologies which are
now nascent, like quantum repeaters to extend the range of quantum communica-
tion, which in turn are likely to rely on transduction of single-photon signals from
optical to microwave frequencies and back. 155 As is the case for quantum comput-
ing, we still lack a clear understanding of what will be the most impactful future
applications of quantum networking.
Advancing quantum technology will also enhance the sensitivity and resolution
of sensors, which can be expected to have widespread applications including in-
ertial sensors for navigation, gravity gradiometers for surveying, magnetometers
for noninvasive nanoscale imaging of living mater, and many others. 156 There are
also applications of fundamental interest, including looking for symmetry viola-
tions in searches for new physics, dark matter detection, detection of gravitational
waves with enhanced sensitivity, and long-baseline optical interferometry enabled
by quantum teleportation within a network of telescopes. These improvements will
be based on advanced quantum strategies, which exploit squeezing, entanglement,
and quantum error correction.
Another important issue is: how can we be sure that a quantum computation
gives the right answer? In some cases, like when factoring a large number, the
answer once found can be easily checked with a classical computer, but that’s not
the case if, for example, we are simulating the properties of a complex quantum
many-body system. Yet clever protocols have been developed for verifying that a
quantum computer really performs an assigned task; these leverage the power of
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quantum-resistant cryptography. 157 One important challenge is to reduce the cost

of these verification protocols so we can make use of them in the relatively near
term, if for example we send a job to a quantum server in the cloud, and want to
be confident that the answer we receive can be trusted.

5. Conclusions
To conclude, we might have a long road ahead to practical commercial applica-
tions of quantum computing, and quantum error correction is most likely the key
to getting there eventually. But the next five years should be exciting, marked by
progress toward fault-tolerant quantum computing and unprecedented opportuni-
ties to explore exotic properties of quantum matter.
As this conference has illustrated, The Physics of Quantum Information provides
unifying concepts and powerful technologies for controlling and exploring complex
many-particle quantum systems of both practical and fundamental interest. Com-
munication among the practitioners of quantum computer science, quantum hard-
ware, quantum matter, and quantum gravity sparks new ideas and insights, making
life sweeter for all of us who investigate the elusive properties of highly entangled
quantum systems.
For the longer term quantum science and technology face enormous challenges,
and many advances in both basic research and systems engineering will be needed
to fulfill our aspirations. We’ve only just begun.

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