Quantum Technology QT in China

First, I am very grateful to the people at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (actually, CASIA) who arranged for me to visit some of the most important places in China, this past week, in Beijing and in Guangzhou. For example, I am honored to have met a young researcher who instantly reminded me of the hero of one of those wushu movies, more so than anyone I ever saw on Wudanshan or Shao Lin.

Second, I am amazed at just how far China is coming in quantum technology, which I will call "QT" here. QT includes quantum information science and technology (QuIST), but is actually bigger than all of that.

Many people in the US have already been talking about the friendly race with China for leadership in QuIST, and have gotten some small growth of funding. But in many ways, it is like a race between a rickshaw (the US efforts) and a jet aircraft. We are ever so proud in the US of how many rosary beads we can attach to our rickshaw, but we mostly seem blind still to what is flying over our heads. 

If you don't to waste time reading my stuff, I suggest you begin by reading the great story of Pan Jianwei:

https://www.shine.cn/archive/sunday/people/Making-a-quantum-leap-in-space-research/

Everyone I met in China was impressed by the personal meetings between Pan and Xi Jinping. Could you imagine Donald Trump having a long and serious discussion with any of the serious quantum physicists of the US, and actually understanding and acting on it?

Pan made his mark as a graduate student in Austria, where he made possible a breakthrough in experiments aimed at telling us about the basic nature of reality. Most people in the US thought that this "GHZ" experiment was just an academic issue, but Anton Zeilinger and others had struggled for years to do such an experiment without success. Years ago, I already googled and read many of the papers of Zeilinger, who was perhaps the world's number one leader in using quantum optics for QuIST. If Pan was decisive in helping HIM, then who is the world leader now?

The whole world knows that China has the record for more conventional two-photon entangled secure communication systems. There are folks in US and Europe proud that THEY have the record for secure long-distance communications by land lines (rickshaw). But what about the secure conversation by satellite between China and Zeilinger? And is it all still mainly just the old two-photon digital qubit stuff? Yet, given Pan's background, and given that China has SEVERAL places which have active abilities in GHZ (versus only one outside China, Zeilinger himself), I hoped that it would not all be just rickshaws. And it wasn't.

Because I was mainly looking for a place to do the all-angles triphoton experiment which I proposed just a few years ago, I did a little googling on the "academic issue" of GHZ. For example, I did a Google when I was in Guangzhou on "Zeilinger Guangzhou." Most interesting for my purposes was a paper by Zhao Rui-Tong, Liang Rui-Sheng and Wang fa-qiang of the laboratory for nanophotonic functional devices (a state key lab) in South China Normal University, on the "science city" campus outside Guangzhou which hosts about ten universities together.  They only wrote about a diagnostic system for GHZ states, but that may be quite important.

There was also an article by Xiaoqing Tan of the mathematics department of Jinan university, describing work supported by the NSF of China (NSFC) as part of the community working on the use of GHZ for a new level of security in communications, beyond what is there in the satellites and landlines now in operation. I also saw a curious paper by W. LiMing and Zhilie Tang, also in South China Normal, suggesting an interest in some of the very deep and heretical issues in physics which I pursue mostly quietly on a different track, though in truth they are much more heretical than I am now. This is just a small sampling. Of course, they also have continuous quantum computing work for another level of security, and ... all for now.

People noted that Pan has published work on SQUIDs, not just photons. That's important. In fact, the moment when they told me about that was the most exciting moment of a very positive, encouraging trip (most of which was on subjects other than QT as such). However, this is not the time or place to get into all the details. It was also exciting to see serious attention by important people to issues I raised in www.werbos.com/IT_big_picture.pdf.