Oxford chosen to help lead quantum computing research

The funding will pay for five research hubs, the government said

Oxford University has been chosen to lead one of five new research hubs to develop quantum technologies.

The government announced £100m of funding for five research hubs to deliver breakthroughs in healthcare, cybersecurity and transport.

The Hub for Quantum Computing is led by the University of Oxford.

Researchers will work closely with industry partners to develop applications, focusing on design for materials, chemicals, fluid simulation techniques, and machine learning.

Experts and physicists say this means that the problems combed over by average computers for years could be solved in a matter of minutes.

• How quantum physics could revolutionise everything

The research hub work will involve over 50 co-investigators with expertise across many different aspects of quantum computing, based at 18 institutions throughout the UK.

It will undertake research under three broad themes:

• Improve quantum computing performance through hardware research to demonstrate its advantage across different platforms

• Develop networking technologies to enable quantum technologies to scale to large systems, ultimately creating distributed quantum computing networks

• Build collaborations with application scientists and engineers to develop algorithms suitable for testing the quantum hardware developed

Oxford University professor Charlotte Deane, who is executive chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), said: "Technologies harnessing quantum properties will provide unparalleled power and capacity for analysis at a molecular level, with truly revolutionary possibilities across everything from healthcare to infrastructure and computing."

Oxfordshire is also home to the National Quantum Computing Centre based at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Harwell near Didcot.

What is quantum computing?

Quantum computers make use of the weird qualities of sub-atomic particles.

So-called quantum particles can be in two places at the same time and also strangely connected even though they are millions of miles apart.

The computers found in most of our homes and workplaces process data in bits, which have a binary value of either zero or one.

Quantum computers instead use a two-state unit for data processing called a qubit.

Source: BBC