koen groenland

koen groenland INTRODUCTION TO QUANTUM COMPUTING FOR BUSINESS

H ow will businesses use quantum technology in the future?

INTRODUCTION TO
What problems will a quantum computer solve? How long
will it take before these devices become commercially relevant?

With the first generation of quantum computers on the horizon,

understanding their impact is more relevant than ever. Luckily,
you don’t need a physics degree to understand the functionality
of these computers – just like you don’t need to know how a
QUANTUM COMPUTING
FOR BUSINESS
transistor works to excel in conventional it.

This book is the perfect introduction to the opportunities and threats

of quantum technologies. It equips you with the necessary knowledge
to join cutting-edge discussions and make strategic decisions.

koen groenland is a theoretical physicist with a PhD in the

near-term applications of quantum computers. He works as an
innovation officer at the University of Amsterdam, where he is
responsible for setting up research collaborations and developing
lifelong learning education for professionals. He is one of the
driving forces behind Quantum. Amsterdam, the innovation hub
that drives the commer­cialisation of quantum technologies
around the Dutch capital.

“Easy to read and full of insights, a must-read for anyone looking

to understand the real-world impact of quantum computing.”
– Diederick Croese, Director of Center for Quantum and Society

“This book offers a well-rounded, scientifically accurate overview

of quantum technology, highlighting its significant potential for
innovation.” – Christian Schaffner, Professor in Theoretical Computer
Science, Director of QuSoft
  

         

Introduction to Quantum Computing for Business.indd 1 11-02-2025 12:05

Introduction to Quantum Computing for Business
Introduction to Quantum Computing
for Business

Koen Groenland

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: © Dadara

Cover design: Mijke Wondergem

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
Illustrations: © Dadara

isbn 978 90 4856 898 7

e-isbn 978 90 4856 899 4 (pdf)
doi 10.5117/9789048568987
nur 120

Creative Commons License CC-BY NC ND (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)

K. Groenland / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2025

Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).
 Table of Contents

Part 1 The essentials

Preface: Why this book? 11

1 An introduction to the quantum world 15

1.1 What is quantum? 15
1.2 Four surprising phenomena 16
1.3 What does a quantum computer look like? 22
1.4 Further reading 26

2 The background: Why are we so enthusiastic about quantum

technology? 27
2.1 What is quantum technology? 27
2.2 The importance of high-performance computing 28
2.3 Why can quantum computers have an advantage? 29
2.4 From algorithm to software 34
2.5 Further reading 35
2.6 Notes 35

3 The applications: What problems will we solve with quantum

computers? 37
3.1 What applications offer a quantum speedup? 38
3.2 How can we compare different types of speedups? 44
3.3 Where is the killer application? 47
3.4 Further reading 51
3.5 Notes 52

4 Timelines: When can we expect a useful quantum computer? 55

4.1 What parameters are relevant? 55
4.2 How many qubits are needed? 58
4.3 How long until we have million-qubit machines? 63
4.4 Putting it all together 67
4.5 Further reading 69
4.6 Notes 69

5 Four myths about quantum computing 71

5.1 Myth 1: Quantum computers find all solutions at once 71
 5.2 Myth 2: Qubits can store much more data than the same
number of classical bits 72
5.3 Myth 3: Entanglement allows you to send information faster
than light or to influence objects at a distance 73
5.4 Myth 4: Quantum computers are always ten years away. 75
5.5 Further reading 76
5.6 Notes 77

Part 2 More about the applications

6 Applications in chemistry and material science 81

6.1 What problems in chemistry and material science will we solve? 81
6.2 Algorithms for quantum chemistry 83
6.3 A hype around quantum computing for climate change 85
6.4 A case study of a potential killer application: FeMoco 86
6.5 Further reading 88
6.6 Notes 89

7 The impact on cybersecurity 91

7.1 Cryptography is much more than just secrecy 91
7.2 The quantum threat is mainly to public key cryptography 93
7.3 What solutions exist? 97
7.4 Conclusion 100
7.5 Further reading 100
7.6 Note 101

8 Applications of quantum networks 103

8.1 The promises of the quantum internet 103
8.2 How useful is the quantum internet in practice? 104
8.3 The case for QKD 105
8.4 Conclusion 107
8.5 Further reading 107

9 Optimisation and AI: What are companies doing today? 109

9.1 Comparing Algorithms and Oranges 109
9.2 Where should we look for a new killer application? 113
9.3 Examples of results in different sectors 114
9.4 Further reading 122
9.5 Notes 123
Part 3 The hardware and strategic actions

10 Quantum hardware 127

10.1 Different functionalities 127
10.2 Different building blocks 131
10.3 Further reading 132
10.4 Note 132

11 Error correction 133

11.1 What is error correction? 134
11.2 Longer computations need more qubits 138
11.3 What is the current state-of-the-art? 141
11.4 Conclusion 143
11.5 Further reading 144

12 What steps should your organisation take? 145

12.1 Common first steps 145
12.2 Prepare to use quantum applications 146
12.3 Migrating to post-quantum cryptography 149
12.4 Further reading 153
12.5 Note 153

Part 4 The final bits

13 Further reading 157

13.1 I want to learn the technical details 157
13.2 I want to learn to program a quantum computer 159
13.3 I want to stay up to date with the latest developments 160
13.4 I want to learn more about business implications 161

14 Overview of quantum computers available today 163

15 Quantum Hype Bingo 165

16 Acknowledgements 167

17 Bibliography 169

18 Index 173
 Part 1

The essentials
 Preface: Why this book?

‘Quantum computing will change everything’, the man in front of me said.

Standing tall and confident, he took another sip of his drink before continuing,
‘It will be the biggest revolution since the invention of the transistor. Imagine
a world where we can cure any disease with personalised medicine. A world
where new energy sources will free us from our dependence on fossil fuels.
Not to mention that…’.
‘Well…’, I tried to interrupt, but the man rattled on, passionately.
‘It will finally enable us to build general Artificial Intelligence that can take
over our tedious everyday jobs, so 95% of our population no longer has to work!’
‘You know that quantum computers are still quite some years away, right?’,
I countered. He leaned in, eyes gleaming with excitement.
‘That’s what most people think. But the reality is, we’re closer than ever.
Quantum supremacy has already been achieved. Google did it in 2019. Since
then, progress has been exponential. Did you see the presentation by that guy
from Goldman Sachs? Their investments are already seeing higher returns
than ever since their new Monte Carlo algorithm’.

The above conversation captures a feeling that many seasoned experts

in quantum computing have. A group of enthusiasts presents ‘quantum’
as a revolutionary technology with unprecedented capabilities. Plentiful
reputable sources report how next-generation devices are key in tackling
climate change, revolutionising AI, and building unhackable networks.
12  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Experts who are actually building quantum computers are much, much
more reticent. At an academic conference, you will hear a completely different
story. Scientists ridicule the absurd claims that some consultants and startups
make. They will point out that the applications of quantum computers are
still highly uncertain and that we’re still searching for convincing use cases.
The quantum scene seems divided into two distinct worlds. One is the
business world, eager to reach out to anybody who will listen to the game-
changing capabilities of quantum computers. The other is a more cautious
community of scientists and technical experts, quietly working to make
quantum computers a reality, sharing their results in specialised papers
that require a PhD to understand.
I was fascinated by this paradoxical situation. Who is right? How powerful
are these quantum computers really, and how do they compare to existing
technologies? In what year will we have a large-scale quantum computer,
and what will it look like? These are billion-dollar questions, but the answers
vary wildly, depending on who you ask.
After searching for these answers for a decade, I find myself in a unique
position to address most of these questions. As a former academic researcher,
I acquired a detailed understanding of quantum computers and their
algorithms. For the past four years, I have had the privilege of forming
R&D collaborations with startups, enterprises, and governments while
having countless meetings with CEOs, research leads, and policymakers.
I’ve seen the perspectives from both worlds and can cut through dishonest
and deceptive claims. Additionally, after training many new colleagues
and setting up professional learning programmes, I have developed a good
intuition about what newcomers want to know about quantum technology
and how to explain it in an accessible way.
However, the decisive factor that led me to write this book is my unease
about other sources. Like many others in this field, I’m unhappy with the many
hyped and unbalanced articles that populate the top entries in Google search
results (or even the New York Times best-selling books1). There is a clear need
for a neutral source of information that others can reference when disagreeing
about facts or debunking myths, and I’m very happy that it’s finally complete.
That doesn’t mean that this book contains only confirmed facts – not
at all! Writing about a computer of the future comes with mountains of
uncertainty. In 2005, nobody could have predicted that, a mere five years
ahead, everyone would be playing games and consuming the internet on
their smartphones. In 2015, nobody could have predicted the impact of Large
Language Models like ChatGPT. And, indeed, today’s best predictions of a
future quantum revolution will prove not to be entirely accurate either.
Preface: Why this book? 13

Even worse, experts wildly disagree in several cases. For example, the
usefulness of quantum AI and optimisation is vigorously disputed, and
the rate at which hardware will progress depends on many yet-to-discover
breakthroughs. The best I can do is describe various perspectives on these
matters and highlight the most salient arguments from both sides.
My colleagues and I had many discussions and disagreements, without
which I wouldn’t have been able to gather the facts and opinions in this
book. And it shouldn’t stop there. I continue to welcome criticism, opinions,
and feedback about these complex topics, aiming to refine these texts even
more in future updates.

Even though much remains uncertain, I think that a reliable indication of

the prospects of quantum computing is more important than ever. Quantum
startups are acquiring huge investments, allowing them to hire managers,
software developers, salesmen, and marketers. Governments need informed
policymakers, and journalists should cover quantum breakthroughs. Pretty
much every organisation that deals with IT will want to keep a close eye on
the impact that ‘quantum’ will have on them.
This book is for precisely these people, who don’t need to understand
all the technical details but who still need to talk, read, and write about
quantum technologies. We will not dwell on the underlying maths or
physics, but rather focus on the functionality of a quantum computer: the
opportunities, threats, and concrete actions that organisations can take.

How should you read this book? I chose to split the content into three parts.
The first part contains the essentials that we recommend everyone should
read. This is an efficient way to learn all the background that you need – it
will prime you for understanding other sources and give you some depth
in professional discussions or meetings. Going into more detail, Part Two
and Three contain more information about the (software) applications
and the (hardware) devices, respectively. A final, fourth part is reserved
for additional resources that can be useful or fun when continuing your
quantum journey.

Note

1. I am referring to Michio Kaku’s book Quantum Supremacy, but before you even
consider reading it, you might like to see the book review by a professor in quantum
computer science at https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7321.
1 An introduction to the quantum world

At a glance
You don’t need to understand quantum mechanics to understand the
functionality of quantum computers. But if you insist, quantum mechanics
describes the behaviour of the smallest particles. It leads to many counter-
intuitive phenomena: computer memory can store multiple pieces of data
simultaneously, but, when measured, nature selects just a single piece and
throws away all the others.

If you want to drive a car, do you need to understand how its engine works?
Of course, you don’t! In a similar vein, you don’t need to know the details of
quantum physics to read the rest of this book. So, feel free to skip this chapter.
Nevertheless, we know that most people want to have some conceptual in-
tuition about what quantum mechanics really is. It is not natural to leave one
of the most used words in this book as an abstract concept, and it might be
hard for the human brain to proceed without at least seeing some examples.
Here is my best attempt to explain quantum mechanics in accessible terms.
Proceed with caution, as things will almost certainly get confusing from here.

1.1 What is quantum?

Quantum physics or quantum mechanics is the theory that describes

the tiniest particles, such as electrons, atoms, and small molecules. The
theory is meant to describe the fundamental laws of nature using a set of
mathematical equations, allowing us to predict cause and effect at the scale
of nanometres. It answers questions like ‘What happens when I bring two
electrons close together?’ or ‘Will these two substances undergo a chemical
reaction?’. You can contrast quantum mechanics to Newton’s classical
physics, which we learned in high school. The classical theory works great
for objects the size of a building or a football but becomes inaccurate at much
smaller scales. Quantum is, in a sense, a refinement of classical physics: the
theories are effectively identical when applied to a coffee mug, but the more
difficult quantum theory is needed to describe very small things.
Some examples of systems where quantum could play a role are:
– Atoms and the electrons that orbit around them.
– Flows of electricity in microscopic (nano-scale) wires and chips.
– Photons, the particles out of which light is made.
16  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

We are going to need some physics jargon to proceed. We like to use the
word ‘state’, which is a complete description of all the physical properties
of the world at one instance: the locations of all the different particles, their
velocities, how much they rotate, etc. Usually, the entire universe is too big
to study, so we often simplify our world to a single, isolated particle or to
a limited piece of computer memory. Let’s imagine a bare particle in an
otherwise empty world. We may be interested in its location, which we’ll
call ​x​. For example, the world might look something like the image below,
which can be described by a very simple state: x​ = 5​(the ruler is just virtual).

In the spirit of computing, we might look at a ‘bit’ that stores information.

Think of it as a tiny magnet that can either point ‘up’ (1) or ‘down’ (0). The
state of a piece of memory is easy to describe, simply by expressing the bit
values one by one. For example: 11010.

Importantly, the state of the world can change over time. We will often
care about the state of the world at a certain moment, for example, at the
beginning of a computation or at the end of it.

1.2 Four surprising phenomena

The most iconic quantum phenomenon is superposition. Think about

any property that we can (classically) measure, such as the position of a
particle or the value of a bit on a hard drive (0 or 1). In quantum mechanics,
many different measurement outcomes can be somewhat ‘true’ at the same
time: a particle can be in multiple positions at once, or a bit could be 0 and
1 simultaneously. When we say ‘at the same time’ we mean that, to predict
An introduc tion to the quantum world 17

any cause and effect, we need to keep track of all these possibilities. To
illustrate a superposition, I sometimes picture a quantum particle splitting
into many opaque copies of itself, spread out over space, where the degree
of transparency determines how likely the particle is to be found there: the
darker it is, the more presence it has at that location.

To throw in some more examples of superpositions: an electron can move

at a velocity of 10 m/s and 100 m/s at the same time (which obviously also
leads to a superposition in its location). More relevant for us: a computer
memory might store the numbers 5 and 11 ‘simultaneously’ or even 46 dif-
ferent Microsoft Excel spreadsheets ‘at once’. An important building block
to make this all work is the qubit, which is any kind of hardware that can
store bit values 0 and 1, and any possible superposition of these two. If we
have a bunch of qubits together, we’ll call it a quantum memory.
Let us illustrate the weirdness of superpositions with an example where
the 46 spreadsheets each take 1 megabit (Mb) to store. A regular, classical
hard drive would allocate the first Mb to a first spreadsheet, then another
Mb to store the second, and so forth. In total, it would use 46 Mb. The
quantum memory has an additional option to store the spreadsheets in
superposition: using the qubit-equivalent of just 1Mb (one million qubits) it
would encode all the data in just that limited amount of memory. Whereas
1 Mb of classical memory can fit just one spreadsheet, a quantum memory
of 1 Mb can represent several of them, all thanks to the unique properties
of quantum physics. However, as we’ll see later, there is a catch to storing
all that data so compactly.

How can you possibly describe a world where particles and computer
memories are in superposition? For now, let’s focus on an isolated particle.
We specify its state using a lengthy list, where for each possible position,
we store a number called the amplitude, which is related to how likely the
particle is to be found at that location. In other words, the state describes
precisely to what extent a particle is at position ​x = 0​, to what extent at
position ​x = 1​, and so forth, for every possible location that the particle
can be at. And indeed, this list could be inf initely long! Luckily, when
dealing with computers, we work with simpler objects. A quantum bit
18  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

needs just two amplitudes, which denote the extent to which the bit is ‘0’
or ‘1’, respectively.
The amplitudes used to describe quantum states feel somewhat analo-
gous to probabilities, which can similarly tell us the likelihood that, for
example, a particle can be found at a particular location. However, there
is a fundamental difference. Probabilities in the classical world help us
deal with information we don’t have: surely, the particle is already at some
location, but perhaps we just don’t know which location yet. Quantum
mechanics is different. Even if we know every tiny detail about the location
of a particle, we still need to describe it as a superposition. Fundamentally,
the location is not determined yet. Hence, there is literally no better way
to describe the particle than by tracking this convoluted superposition.
Amplitudes are also more finicky to deal with than probabilities because
these numbers can become negative (and for math experts, they can even
be complex numbers).
The second weird phenomenon is how quantum measurements work.
Why do we never observe an electron at two places at the same time? Why
do I never find a car both moving and standing still? In quantum mechanics,
as soon as we measure the location of a particle, it instantly jumps to a single
location at random – making its location fully determined. Similarly, when
we measure a qubit, it jumps to either ‘0’ or ‘1’. When we measure the data
in a quantum memory, we may find any one of the 46 spreadsheets that
were stored. A measurement essentially changes a system into a normal,
classical state.
The effect of a measurement is intrinsically random (and hence, our world
is not deterministic!). But this doesn’t imply that we cannot understand
quantum mechanics. We can calculate the probabilities of measurement
outcomes with incredible precision as long as we know the state before the
measurement.
It is important to note that we cannot learn anything about the world
without measuring – it is our only way to obtain data about physical objects.
Any observation, even a slight peek at our system, is a measurement in
quantum mechanics. Additionally, measurements are destructive in the
sense that they change the state of the world. We fundamentally cannot
‘look’ at a particle without disturbing it. In fact, measurements delete all the
rich data encoded in a superposition! If a particle was initially at position​
x = 0​,​ x = 3 ​a nd ​x = 10,​all simultaneously, then upon measurement,
it jumps to one of these three options. To give you a bit of jargon, we call
this instantaneous change a ‘collapse.’ From that moment, it is 100% at a
fixed location: if, at first, we measure the particle to be at ​x = 3​, then any
An introduc tion to the quantum world 19

subsequent measurement will give the same result, until some other force
moves it again. In the context of a quantum computation, this means that
we should carefully choose when we perform any measurements – we
cannot just peek at the data at any moment we like, or we risk disturbing
a superposition.
This also means that a single piece of quantum memory cannot store an
immense number of spreadsheets at the same time – at least, you wouldn’t
be able to retrieve each of them. To store 15 Mb worth of classical data, we
need 15 Mb worth of qubits. Hence, quantum computers are not particularly
useful for storing classical data.
The fact that a measurement changes the state of the world poses a
serious problem for the engineers who are building quantum computers.
No matter what material we construct our qubits from, they will surely
interact with other nearby particles, and some of these interactions could
act like destructive measurements. We call this effect decoherence, and,
as we will see later, this forms one of the core challenges to large-scale
quantum computation.
At this point, quantum data doesn’t seem particularly useful. Why would
we want to deal with superpositions if they lead to all this uncertainty? The
important advantage stems from the way in which a quantum computer can
process quantum data. Using quantum mechanics, a device can manipulate
data in ways that a classical computer could never do.
That leads us to the third unique phenomenon. A quantum computer
can manipulate the data it stores using so-called quantum gates, or simply
‘gates’ for short. These are rapid bursts of some physical forces that change
the state of one or more qubits. They can turn a classical-looking state into
a quantum superposition or vice versa. They can act like logical operations,
like the AND and OR gates that are used in classical electronics, but also
like new quantum logic that has no classical counterpart.
From a functional perspective, a quantum gate takes one or more
qubits as input, changes their internal state, and then outputs the same
number of qubits (with their altered states). In other words, the number
of physical objects remains unchanged, but the overall state changes. As
an example, you may think of our prototypical magnet that was initially
pointing ‘up’, but a quantum gate might flip this to ‘down’. There are many
such gates possible, each having a different effect on their input. We like
to give them names in capital letters, such as X, Z, H, and CX. Importantly,
a quantum gate is deterministic, meaning that its input-output behaviour
is always the same, as opposed to the quantum measurements we saw
earlier.
20  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

The canonical way to describe a quantum computer program is by defining

a sequence of quantum gates, where for each gate, we also indicate what
qubits are supposed to be the gate’s input. At the end of the computation,
we measure all qubits. An example of such a program, using the standard
Quantum Assembly (QASM) language, is given below.

Together, these steps can be graphically displayed in a quantum circuit,

as shown here on the right. Quantum circuits represent each qubit with
a horizontal line and indicate time flowing from left to right. Whenever a
box with a letter is displayed over a qubit line, then the corresponding gate
should be applied. This isn’t unlike the way we read sheet music! You may
notice that sometimes, two or more gates can be performed in parallel as
long as they act on different qubits.
When we run a circuit on an actual quantum computer, the final measure-
ments lead to probabilistic outcomes. We get to see a bunch of ones and zeroes:
one classical bit for each qubit. If the circuit is a good quantum algorithm,
then, with high probability, these classical bits will tell us the answer we
are looking for. But even then, we might need to redo the computation a few
times and take (for example) the most common result as our final answer.

If you are completely confused at this point, you are not alone. The whole
business of quantum superposition and quantum operations is incredibly
complex and is not something you could possibly master after reading a
few pages. Scientists who have studied the subject for many years are still
An introduc tion to the quantum world 21

frequently baffled by deceptive paradoxes and counter-intuitive phenomena.

On the other hand, we hope that the functionality of quantum circuits
makes some sense: we define a list of instructions and feed them into a
machine that can execute them. We don’t have to know precisely what’s
going on under the hood!
There is one remaining quantum phenomenon to cover – one that comes
with a mysterious flair surrounding it. We’re talking about quantum en-
tanglement, which we’ll describe using the following example.
Imagine that we have two qubits, which we can transport independently
from each other without disturbing the data they store. Together, the qubits
can represent the states 00, 01, 10, or 11, or any superposition of these. Ac-
cording to quantum mechanics, we can create a very specific state where
the pair of qubits is simultaneously 00 and 11. Now, imagine that computer
scientist Alice grabs one of the qubits, takes it on her rocket ship, and flies
it all the way to the dwarf planet Pluto. The other qubit remains on Earth
in the hands of physicist Bob. Upon arriving on Pluto, Alice measures her
qubit and finds outcome ‘1’. A deep question is: what do we now know about
Bob’s qubit?
Since the only possible measurement outcomes were 00 and 11, the other
qubit can only be measured as ‘1’ from now onwards. It essentially collapses
to be 100% in the state ‘1’. But how could the Earth-based qubit possibly know
that a measurement occurred on Pluto? What mechanism made it collapse?
According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, information cannot travel faster
than the speed of light, which translates into a few hours between Earth
and Pluto. Nevertheless, measuring the qubits in two faraway locations will
always give a consistent result, even when the two qubits are measured at
exactly the same time.
This paradox reveals, once again, how confusing quantum mechanics
can be. However, the story above is perfectly consistent with both quan-
tum mechanics and the theory of relativity. The core principle is that no
information can be sent faster than light between Alice and Bob. For example,
can you see why Bob has no way of detecting when Alice performs her
measurement just by looking at his entangled qubit? In the most common
interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Earth qubit does indeed change
its state instantaneously when Alice measures her qubit, although there is
no way to exploit this effect for fast messaging.
More generally, entanglement is the phenomenon where two or more fara-
way qubits can have correlated measurement outcomes that are classically
impossible. There is a fascinating further discussion about the philosophy
behind entanglement, but we’ll leave that to other sources. What matters
22  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

to us is that entanglement leads to new functionalities that we can exploit.

We will discover what these are in the chapter on quantum networks.
So, there you have it: four surprising phenomena you may hear frequently
in quantum technology conversations. To summarise:
– Superposition: the phenomenon where a qubit is both 0 and 1 at the same
time.
– Quantum measurement: measuring a quantum memory destroys super-
position. The result we obtain is probabilistic.
– Quantum gates: deterministic changes to the state of qubits, which gen-
eralise classical logic gates like OR, AND, NOT. A list of several quantum
gates (together with the qubits they act on) forms a quantum circuit.
– Entanglement: qubits separated over a long distance can still share unique
properties.

1.3 What does a quantum computer look like?

Most large-scale computing today happens in data centres, where we don’t

care much about the specifics of the devices that do our calculations. We
also expect that future quantum computers will mostly be tucked away in
the ‘cloud’, making their appearance and inner workings largely irrelevant
to most users. However, for this optional chapter, we can take the oppor-
tunity to view what today’s cutting-edge hardware looks like. There are
many different ways to build a quantum computer, each based on distinct
physical systems and principles. Here, we describe the example of so-called
superconducting qubits, a relatively mature platform used by companies like
IBM, Google, and Rigetti and several academic institutes. Research institute
QuTech in Delft, the Netherlands, was kind enough to provide photos that
allow us to look inside their labs. We will see that only a tiny part of the
computer is actually ‘quantum’, whereas most of the machine consists of
classical machinery that’s required to keep the computer working.
The real quantum magic happens on a chip, not unlike the computer
chips used in your laptop or phone. The qubits are formed by tiny electronic
circuits where the flow of electrical current is restricted to just one out
of two states: the ‘bit’ states 0 and 1. Since this is a quantum system, the
current can also be in a superposition – picture all the electrons in the wire
participating both in flow ‘0’ and flow ‘1’ simultaneously! This only works
when the chip is cooled down to unimaginably low temperatures, down
to around 10 millikelvin – a hundredth of a degree above absolute zero. At
these temperatures, the electronic circuits become superconducting, such
An introduc tion to the quantum world 23

A quantum chip. Photo credits: Marc Blommaert for QuTech.

that an initial current can flow indefinitely. This is important because any
damping of the current would cause unwanted disturbance to the qubit state.
The temperature constraint is why the quantum chip is placed in a
massive dilution refrigerator, a cylinder of about half a metre in diameter
and over a metre tall, which specialises in keeping the quantum chip cool.
In the future, larger quantum computers may need even bigger fridges or
combine several of these close together. Deeper parts of the fridge have
increasingly low temperatures, allowing us to cool in stages. An example
could be to cool a first environment to 35 Kelvin (-283 °Celsius or -396.7
°Fahrenheit), followed by subsequent stages to ~3K, 900mK, 100mK, until
the final stage of ~10mK is reached.
Engineers typically suspend the fridge on the ceiling so that the higher
temperatures are on top, and the ultracold quantum chip is placed at the
very bottom. The internals are shaped accordingly: several layers of gold
disks are hung below one another, one disk for each temperature zone. A
large number of wires run between the disks, transporting signals between
the ceiling and the lowermost areas. The whole structure forms the iconic
metal chandelier that you often see in images, although it would all be
covered by a boring metal case when the fridge is in operation.
To make the qubits do something useful, like executing a quantum gate
or performing a measurement, we need to send signals into the chip. Just
like with classical computers, a ‘signal’ is a voltage difference between
24  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

The interior of a dilution fridge, as used for superconducting quantum computers. Photo credits:
Marc Blommaert for QuTech.
An introduc tion to the quantum world 25

A stack of classical control electronics used to generate and measure electronic signals. Photo
credits: Marc Blommaert for QuTech.

two or more wires. Some voltages remain constant over time, others oscil-
late at microwave frequencies. Having a larger number of wires can lead
to more precise quantum gates, but extensive wiring also leads to two
fundamental challenges. Firstly, we currently need around 2–4 wires to
control a single qubit, which is problematic when we scale to millions of
qubits – it’s impossible to connect that many wires to a tiny chip. We’ll need
to find multiplexing solutions, where a single wire can serve multiple qubits
at once. Secondly, wires connect the ultracold chip to other hardware that
sits at room temperature, forming a channel for heat and noise to enter. The
dilution fridge circumvents this by incrementally cooling and damping the
signals as they travel through the different layers of the fridge, but it can
only handle so many cables.
Besides the large chandelier, an array of specialised control electronics
is needed to produce the necessary electronic pulses and to carefully read
out the tiny signals that qubits produce when we measure them. These
devices sit in one or multiple electronics racks, each half a metre wide
and nearly two metres tall, similar to the ones you’ll find in a typical data
centre. Ironically, the actual quantum software can be written on a simple
laptop, from where the instructions are passed to the control electronics
to run a quantum circuit.
26  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

The state of today’s quantum hardware is reminiscent of early computers in

the 1940s and 1950s, which similarly occupied entire rooms and required several
engineers for all kinds of laborious manual maintenance tasks. Moreover, the
dilution fridges are particularly noisy – to the extent that those who operate
them ideally do this from a different room – and they are fairly power-hungry.
The quantum computer described above consumes around 25 kW, comparable
to driving an electric car. Fortunately, we have good reasons to believe that, over
the comings decades, quantum computers will become increasingly compact,
efficient, powerful, and dependable, much like their classical cousins did.

1.4 Further reading

If you’d like to know more about the physics and math behind qubits, we
recommend the following sources:

Quantum Country – a great online textbook about Quantum Computing

by Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen.

QuTech Academy’s School of Quantum explains a broad range of quantum

topics using short videos.

(YouTube) A video tour that looks inside IBM’s superconducting quantum

computer.
2 The background: Why are we
so enthusiastic about quantum
technology?

At a glance
Quantum technology is an umbrella term for devices that exploit quantum
phenomena such as superposition and entanglement. The most notable
innovations are expected in computers, networks, sensors, and simulators.
Quantum computers can have a speed advantage thanks to their ability
to run quantum algorithms, which solve specific problems in much fewer
steps than conventional methods. However, quantum computers are ex-
pected to have relatively low clock speeds, so the algorithmic advantage
must be significant before a practical speedup manifests itself.

2.1 What is quantum technology?

Quantum physics, the rules that dictate the behaviour of the tiniest particles,
has already proven itself as an invaluable basis for new technologies. Without
this scientific theory, many invaluable tools like LED lighting, MRI scanners
and solar cells may not have been invented. And it’s still relevant to push
the limits of innovation, with nano-size vehicles that consist of just a few
atoms or ever-smaller transistors on computer chips on the horizon.
Just ahead of us is a new paradigm, which we’ll call quantum technology.
The distinguishing factor is that it goes beyond merely building stuff from
small particles. Quantum technology is about devices that perform certain
processes in a fundamentally different way. That is, the data (or operations)
we work with can have special properties unique to quantum physics, such
as superposition and entanglement.
In our jargon, we will refer to ‘classical’ technology for devices that don’t
carefully exploit the possibilities of quantum physics – they are based on
‘classical’ physics that we’re used to from high school. Your laptop and
phone are examples of classical computers, and they’re connected to the
classical internet. The internal transistors and electrical circuits might be
so tiny that quantum physics is relevant there, but the fundamental point is
that the information that they process is purely classical. Whereas classical
computers work with ‘bits’, quantum technology will need a different type
28  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

of information carrier that itself can be controlled at a quantum-mechanical

level. We’ll call these objects ‘quantum bits’, or ‘qubits’ for short.
Within the field of quantum technology, we distinguish four categories:
– Quantum computers are devices that use quantum physics to perform
automatic calculations to solve a problem. Computing is considered the
most impactful application for most organisations, hence it’s the main
focus of this book.
– Quantum networks are connections between quantum devices over
which qubits (or similar forms of quantum data) can be transmitted.
The most relevant use case is to strengthen the cryptography used by
classical computers, but there are many more applications.
– Quantum sensors are devices that exploit the effects of quantum physics
to accurately measure certain quantities, such as a magnetic field or the
strength of the Earth’s gravity. Quantum clocks also fall into this category.
– Quantum simulators are devices similar to quantum computers, except
that they specialise in solving a limited set of problems. Typically, they
are built to reproduce the behaviour of atoms and electrons in a specific
molecule or a piece of material, allowing us to measure properties like
energies and reaction rates.

Each of these categories accomplishes a different goal or functionality.

For now, we’ll remain agnostic about how they are built – it will be a task
for hardware engineers to figure out how our desired functionality is best
implemented. Since all these devices have to deal with quantum-mechanical
processes under the hood, it is not uncommon that they use similar building
blocks. In this book, we mainly focus on computers and networks because
these seem to have the biggest impact on typical (business) users.

2.2 The importance of high-performance computing

The abundance of cheap computational power has given humanity incredible

wealth. We automated the most tedious tasks to free up time for leisure and
to solve other urgent problems. It allowed us to scale factories, supply chains,
and logistics to unprecedented sizes, allowing us to transport resources
around the globe at minimal costs. Thanks to computer-aided design, the
performance of computer chips, aeroplane wings, heart monitors, and LCD
screens has improved with every generation.
Today, our computers are already incredibly fast. In fact, for many applica-
tions, there is little economic gain in making these computers even faster.
The background: Why are we so enthusiastic about quantum technology? 29

Decades-old machines can successfully oversee factory operations, and

writing a text document or scheduling a meeting with eight busy colleagues
is not limited by the speed of your computer in any way.
However, this book is specifically about the applications where we are
still hungry for more computational power. For example, by feeding more
data into weather models, forecasts can become more accurate. If staff
rostering would take less time, we could take more last-minute changes
into account. Accurate predictions of drug reactivity in the human body
could save on costly medical trials and reduce the time to market. Machine
learning models like ChatGPT are still demanding more training hours to
produce more sophisticated results.
It should be clear that we’re not talking about computations that happen
on your laptop. We’re thinking of problems where somehow there’s value
in investing in the fastest possible computers on Earth. This is the domain
of high-performance computing (HPC), colloquially called supercomput-
ers. Merely looking at the market, there seems to be incredible value in
computing stuff: companies and academics spend tens of billions of dollars
on them,1 and hardware suppliers like Nvidia have rapidly grown to become
among the most valuable companies. We should keep a close eye on this
field because the kinds of problems that are now being crunched in HPC are
likely to be the ones where radically new computational tools like quantum
computers can have the biggest commercial impact.

2.3 Why can quantum computers have an advantage?

A naive view of quantum computers is that they’re simply faster than their
conventional cousins. Or perhaps one may naively point at Moore’s law:
with transistors reaching atomic scales, we run into quantum effects, so
quantum physics may help us make better chips. However, none of these
are our core motivations for looking at quantum computers.
When we talk about a computer’s speed, most people will refer to its
clock speed: the number of basic computational steps that a single processor
core can complete in one second. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that
quantum computers will catch up with classical machines in terms of raw
clock speed any time soon, partly because the speed of a modern CPU is
already spectacular. A modern desktop processor, or even the one in your
phone, works at a rate of several GHz, that is, several billions of steps per
second. In each of these steps, a broad palette of operations can be applied
to astronomically large numbers – modern chips work with 64-bit values,
30  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

meaning that numbers up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 can be processed.

Each of these elementary steps can be something like addition, multiplica-
tion, a comparison, etc., and we have powerful tools to weave these basic
operations together to form efficient software.
Now, quantum computers are supposed to be even faster, right? Well, it’s
not hard to find support for that claim:

News headers by Techradar2 and IFLScience3.

You may be disappointed to hear that, as of 2024, quantum computers cannot

even add or multiply numbers of more than 3 or 4 bits. And even if they
could, their rate of operation would by no means reach several GHz, but more
likely several MHz (a few million operations per second) at best. In other
words, they’re more than a thousand times slower. To make things worse,
the information in quantum computers is extremely fragile and needs to
be constantly checked and corrected using so-called error correction. This
is a form of overhead that could make quantum computers another several
orders of magnitude slower. Even in the far future, when quantum computers
are more mature and more reliable, we still expect them to be much slower
than the classical chips at that time.
How does this rhyme with the news about ever-faster quantum comput-
ers? And why are we still interested in these slow machines? As we claimed
before, we hope to do certain computations in a fundamentally different
way. Let’s look at a beautiful analogy that Andy Matuschak and Michael
Nielsen bring up in their online course Quantum Country4 .
The background: Why are we so enthusiastic about quantum technology? 31

Imagine that you’d like to travel from Morocco to Spain, which are separated
by a small piece of sea called the Strait of Gibraltar. If your technology does
not allow you to cross the sea, then you’d need to take a large detour, all the
way through North Africa, past the Arabian Peninsula, and through Europe,
before you can reach your destination. This represents the steps taken by a
classical computer. In the same analogy, a quantum computer grants you
the ability to traverse both land and sea (much like a hovercraft) so that
you can take a much more direct route.
The beauty of quantum computation is that we have a fundamentally
different way to travel (do computations), which can sometimes bring us to
our destination using a shorter route (doing fewer computational steps). Even
with a much slower vehicle (computer), one may arrive at the destination
sooner. In fact, the quantum advantage often grows as problems become
larger and more complicated.
The analogy also shows that quantum computers do not always have
an advantage: you would not want to travel from Amsterdam to Berlin
by hovercraft. Unfortunately, in many cases, we don’t yet know what the
fastest means of transportation is. It is still an active area of research to
completely map out the landscape over which quantum and classical
computers can travel and to determine which problems allow a speedup,
and which don’t.
For this reason, we don’t expect that classical computers will be
replaced any time soon. Instead, classical and quantum processors will
live side by side, and programmers will pick whichever tool is better
suited to solve a certain problem. The situation could be similar to how
we use graphical processing units (GPUs) today, which offer tremendous
The background: Why are we so enthusiastic about quantum technology? 33

speedups for the training of artificial intelligence models but are not made
to replace regular classical processors (CPUs). Perhaps we should even
give quantum computers a similar abbreviation, like ‘QPU’ for Quantum
Processing Unit.
In the analogy with the Strait of Gibraltar, the precise route that you travel
denotes the chosen algorithm. In the field of computer science, an algorithm
is a step-by-step list of instructions that describes how a computational
problem should be solved. The ‘steps’ here should be sufficiently simple so
that it is completely unambiguous how to do them. They could be operations
such as adding, multiplying, or comparing two numbers. Needless to say,
the fewer steps the algorithm requires, the better.
By exploiting quantum mechanics, a quantum computer introduces
new basic steps that are impossible to perform on a classical computer.
For example, the previous chapter introduced quantum logic gates that
generalise operations like AND and OR. Using these building blocks, we
can formulate quantum algorithms that take much fewer steps than the
best classical algorithm ever could!

In the end, the time needed to solve a problem can be very roughly calculated
as:

“Time to solve a problem” = “time per step” × “number of steps required”

The ‘time per step’ is a property of the hardware that you use. Clearly, a faster
CPU will lead to faster solutions. The ‘number of steps required’ is dictated
by the algorithm. The latter is precisely how quantum computers can offer
spectacular speedups. As long as the improvement in the ‘number of steps
required’ compensates for the disadvantage in ‘time per step’, a quantum
computer can help us solve problems in less time!
A recurring theme in this book is the search for industrially relevant
quantum algorithms. This turns out to be more challenging than it seems at
first sight. Quantum algorithms are built on deep and complex mathematics,
rely on counter-intuitive quantum phenomena, and require inventive new
methods to tackle a problem. Simple tweaks to existing classical algorithms
are rarely sufficient. In fact, for most problems, no quantum speedups have
been identified at all, despite the best attempts by scientists worldwide. We
might go as far as to say that, even if we had a large-scale quantum computer
today, its value would be limited. For this reason, the ongoing development
of novel algorithms is exceedingly important.
34  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

2.4 From algorithm to software

In the end, simply finding a good algorithm is not enough: it has to be turned
into software, a piece of language that explicitly tells a computer how to
execute the step-by-step instructions.
The difference between ‘algorithms’ and ‘software’ is subtle. An algorithm
is a purely mathematical description that describes precisely how numbers
should be manipulated. It could tell which two numbers must be multiplied,
what function must be evaluated, or how an image must be transformed.
However, different computers can use different types of processors and
memory, and an algorithm does not describe how these operations are done
on a specific computer. This is where software comes into play. It describes
precisely what hardware operation must be called, where each number is
stored in memory, and how an image is represented in binary.
As an analogy, you may think of the algorithm as a recipe to bake the
perfect chocolate cookie. The algorithm should unambiguously describe
what should happen to the ingredients: in what order they should be mixed,
how long they should be heated at what temperature, etc. However, to build
a factory that produces these cookies, you need to be even more specific:
Where is the sugar stored? Out of what pipe does the dough flow? How are
cookies laid next to each other in the oven?
Fundamentally, core scientific breakthroughs come from finding new
algorithms. Once a new algorithm is found, it can be re-used many different
times on any capable machine (assuming a good software developer will
turn it into appropriate code!).
In this book, we care less about quantum software and more about quan-
tum algorithms. Firstly, the algorithms tell us precisely the functionality that
quantum computers can offer. Moreover, we don’t yet know how a mature
quantum computer will be programmed or how quantum hardware and
software will change in the following years. On the other hand, once a new
algorithm is found, it can be cherished forever.
Now that we have come to appreciate algorithms, it is natural to ask which
quantum algorithms we know of. What problems do quantum comput-
ers solve well? And how do these algorithms compare to their classical
equivalents? This will be the topic of the next chapter.
The background: Why are we so enthusiastic about quantum technology? 35

2.5 Further reading

The Map of Quantum Computing (YouTube) – A 30-minute overview video

by Domain of Science that forms a great supplement to this book.

Chris Ferrie’s book What You Shouldn’t Know About Quantum Computers
debunks several myths about quantum computers, presented in an
accessible way.

Are you looking for a much more extensive and technical source that
covers pretty much everything there is to know about quantum comput-
ers? French consultant Olivier Ezratty has written a 1500+ page book,
Understanding Quantum Technologies.

2.6 Notes

1. See e.g. https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/Quantum-High-

Performance-Computing-Market-631.html and https://www.mordorintelligence.com/
industry-reports/cloud-high-performance-computing-hpc-market.
2. Wyciślik-Wilson, S.E. (2019) ‘Google creates quantum chip millions of times faster than
the fastest supercomputer’, TechRadar. https://www.techradar.com/news/google-
creates-quantum-chip-millions-of-times-faster-than-the-fastest-supercomputer.
3. Dunhill, J. (2021) ‘Chinese Scientists Create Quantum Processor 60,000 Times Faster
Than Current Supercomputers’, IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/chinese-
scientists-create-quantum-processor-60000-times-faster-than-current-supercomput-
ers-61475.
4. Matuschak, A. and Nielsen, M. (2019) ‘Quantum Country’. https://quantum.country.
3 The applications: What problems will
we solve with quantum computers?

At a glance
The most important application areas are:
1. the simulation of material properties and chemical processes;
2. cracking cryptography;
3. using quantum networks to distribute cryptographic keys; and
4. solving large-scale optimisation and AI problems.

Getting utility out of a quantum computer is not straightforward. It re-

quires an algorithm that beats all other known methods (even those that
run on very fast classical computers), and it must tackle a problem with
real-world relevance. Especially in optimisation and AI, we have not found
a convincing ‘killer application’ yet.

In the previous chapter, we saw that quantum algorithms can solve certain
problems in fewer steps, allowing a large-scale quantum computer to com-
plete specific tasks much faster than any classical computer could. However,
the precise speedup depends strongly on the task at hand. Therefore, the
most important question in this field is: for which problems do quantum
computers offer a meaningful advantage?
The Quantum Algorithm Zoo1 lists pretty much all known quantum
algorithms. It has become an impressive list that cites over 400 papers.
Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, it’s hard to extract precisely the
useful business applications, for a few reasons. Some algorithms solve
highly artificial problems for which no real business use cases are known.
Others may make unrealistic assumptions or may only offer a speedup
when dealing with an outrageously large amount of data (that we never
encounter in the real world). Nevertheless, scrolling through it is definitely
recommended.
For this book, we take a different approach. We focus specifically on
algorithms with plausible business applications. To assess their advantage,
we split our main question into two parts:
– What applications offer a quantum speedup?
– How large is this speedup in practice?
38  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

3.1 What applications offer a quantum speedup?

We foresee four major families of use cases where quantum computing

can make a real impact on society. We briefly discuss each of them here.
For more details, we dedicate a more in-depth chapter to each application
family in Part 2.

1. Simulation of other quantum systems: Molecules, materials, and

chemical processes

Most materials can be accurately simulated on classical computers. However,

in some specific situations, the locations of atoms and electrons become
notoriously hard to describe, sometimes requiring quantum mechanics to
make useful predictions. Such problems are the prototypical examples of
where a quantum computer can offer a great advantage. Realistic applica-
tions could be in designing new chemical processes (leading to cheaper and
more energy-efficient factories), estimating the effects of new medicine, or
working towards materials with desirable properties (like superconductors
or semiconductors). Of course, scientists will also be excited to simulate
the physics that occur in exotic circumstances, like at the Large Hadron
Collider or in black holes.
Simulation is, however, not a silver bullet, and quantum computers
will not be spitting out recipes for new pharmaceuticals by themselves.
Breakthroughs in chemistry and material science will still require a mix
of theory, lab testing, computation, and, most of all, the hard work of smart
scientists and engineers. From this perspective, quantum computers have
the potential to become a valued new tool for R&D departments.

2. Cracking a certain type of cryptography

The security of today’s internet communication relies heavily on a cryp-

tographic protocol invented by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman (RSA) in
the late 70s. The protocol helps distribute secret encryption keys (so that
nobody else can read messages in transit) and guarantees the origin of files
and webpages (so that you know that the latest Windows update actually
came from Microsoft, and not from some evil cybercriminal). RSA works
thanks to an ingenious mathematical trick: honest users can set up their
encryption using relatively few computational steps, whereas ‘spying’ on
others would require one to solve an extremely hard problem. For the RSA
cryptosystem, that problem is prime factorisation, where the goal is to
The applications: What problems will we solve with quantum computers? 39

decompose a very large number (for illustration purposes, let’s think of 15)
into its prime factors (here: 3 and 5). As far as we know, for sufficiently large
numbers, this task takes such an incredibly long time that nobody would
ever succeed in breaking a relevant code – at least on a classical computer.
This all changed in 1994 when computer scientist Peter Shor discovered that
quantum computers happen to be quite good at factoring.
The quantum algorithm by Shor can crack RSA (and also its cousin
called elliptic curve cryptography, abbreviated to ECC) in a relatively ef-
ficient way using a quantum computer. To be more concrete, according
to a recent paper,2 a plausible quantum computer could factor the required
2048-bit number in roughly eight hours (and using approximately twenty
million imperfect qubits). Note that future breakthroughs may further
reduce the stated time and qubit requirements.
Fortunately, not all cryptography is broken as easily by a quantum com-
puter. RSA and ECC fall into the category of public key cryptography, which
delivers a certain range of functionalities. A different class of protocols
is symmetric key cryptography, which is reasonably safe against quantum
computers but doesn’t provide the same rich functionality as public
key crypto. The most sensible approach is replacing RSA and ECC with
so-called post-quantum cryptography (PQC): public key cryptosystems
resilient to attackers with a large-scale quantum computer. Interestingly,
PQC does not require honest users (that’s you) to have a quantum computer:
it will work perfectly fine on today’s PCs, laptops, and servers.
At the time of writing, a complex migration lies ahead of pretty much
every large organisation in the world, which comes in addition to many
existing cybersecurity threats. The foundations have been laid: thanks
to the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),
cryptographers from around the globe came together to select the best
quantum-safe alternatives, culminating in the publication of the f irst
standards in August 2024. These are the new algorithms that the vast
majority of users will adopt.
Unfortunately, many governments and enterprises run a great amount of
legacy software that is hard to update, making this a complex IT migration
that could easily take 5–15 years, depending on the organisation. There’s a
serious threat that quantum computers will be able to run Shor’s algorithm
within such a timeframe, so organisations are encouraged to start migrating
as early as possible.
A new type of cryptography comes with its own additional risks: the new
standards have not yet been tested as thoroughly as the nearly fifty-year-old
RSA algorithm. Ideally, new implementations will be hybrid, meaning that
40  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

they combine the security of a conventional and a post-quantum algorithm.

Moreover, organisations are encouraged to adopt cryptographic agility, mean-
ing that cryptosystems can be easily changed or updated if the need arises.

3. Quantum Key Distribution to strengthen cryptography

Out of all the applications for quantum networks, Quantum Key Distribu-
tion (QKD) is the one to watch. It allows two parties to generate secure
cryptographic keys together, which can then be used for everyday needs like
encryption and authentication. It requires a quantum network connection
that transports photons in fragile quantum states. Such connections can
currently reach a few hundred kilometres, and there is a clear roadmap
for expanding to a much wider internet. The most likely usage will be as
an ‘add-on’ for high-security purposes (such as military communication or
data exchange between data centres), in addition to standard post-quantum
cryptography.
Unfortunately, we often see media articles suggesting that QKD is a solu-
tion to the threat of Shor’s algorithm and that it would form an ‘unbreakable
internet’. Both claims are highly inaccurate. Firstly, QKD does not offer the
wide range of functionality that public key cryptography offers, so it is not
a complete replacement for the cryptosystems broken by Shor. Secondly,
there will almost certainly be ways to hack a QKD system (just like with
any other security system). So, why bother with QKD? The advantage of
QKD is based on one important selling point: contrary to most other forms
of cryptography, it does not rely on assumptions about the computational
power of a hacker. This can be an essential factor when someone is highly
paranoid about their cryptography or when data has to remain confidential
for an extremely long period of time.
As of 2024, pretty much every national security agency discourages the
use of QKD simply because the available products are far from mature, and
because PQC should be prioritised. It is unclear how successful QKD could
be in the future – we will discuss this in-depth in the dedicated chapter on
quantum networks.
We firmly warn that other security products with the word ‘quantum’
in the name do not necessarily offer protection against Shor’s algorithm. In
particular, quantum random number generators (QRNGs) are sometimes
promoted as a saviour against the quantum threat, which is nonsense.
These devices serve a completely different purpose: they compete with
existing hardware to generate unpredictable secret keys, which find a use
(for example) in hardware security modules in data centres.
42  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

4. Optimisation and machine learning

This is the part where most enterprises get excited. Can we combine the suc-
cess of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning with the radically new
capabilities of quantum computers? Can we create a superpowered version
of ChatGPT or DALL-E, or at least speed up the demanding training process?
In this section, we’ll take a closer look at the known applications for
quantum computers on ‘non-quantum problems’ other than cryptography.
We focus specifically on the harder optimisation problems that currently
take up large amounts of classical resources. Under the hood, all such ap-
plications are based on concrete mathematical problems such as binary
optimisation, differential equations, classification, optimal planning, and
so forth. For conciseness, we will use the word ‘optimisation’ as a catch-all
term for all these problems, including things like machine learning and AI.
Unfortunately, the amount of value that ‘quantum’ can add to optimisa-
tion tasks is a highly disputed topic. The situation here is very subtle: many
promising quantum algorithms exist, but, as we’ll see, each comes with
important caveats that might limit their practical usefulness. To start,
we can classify the known algorithms into the following three categories.

Rigorous but slow algorithms

Many quantum optimisation algorithms have a well-proven quantum
speedup: there is no dispute that these require fewer computational steps than
any classical algorithm. For instance, a famous quantum algorithm invented
by Lov Grover (with extensions by Dürr and Høyer) finds the maximum of
a function in fewer steps than a conventional brute-force search. Similarly,
quantum speedups were found for popular computational methods such
as backtracking, gradient descent, linear programming, lasso, and for solving
differential equations.
The key question is whether this also means that the quantum computer
requires less time! All of the above optimisation algorithms offer a so-
called polynomial speedup (in the case of Grover, this is sometimes further
specified to be a quadratic speedup). As we will soon see, it is not entirely
clear if these speedups are sufficient to compensate for the slowness of a
realistic quantum computer – at least in the foreseeable future.

Heuristic algorithms
Some algorithms claim much larger speedups, but there is no undisputed
evidence to back this up. Often, these algorithms are tested on small datasets
using the limited quantum computers available today – which are still so tiny
The applications: What problems will we solve with quantum computers? 43

that not much can be concluded about larger-scale problems. Nonetheless,

these ‘high risk, high reward’ approaches typically make the bold claims that
receive media attention. The most noteworthy variants are the following.
– Variational quantum circuits (VQC) are relatively short quantum programs
that a classical computer can incrementally change. In jargon, these are
quantum circuits that rely on a set of free parameters. The classical com-
puter will run these programs many times, trying different parameters
until the quantum program behaves as desired (for example, it might output
efficient train schedules or accurately describe a complex molecule). The
philosophy is that we squeeze as much as possible out of small quantum
computers with short-lived qubits: the (fast) classical computer takes care
of most of the computation, whereas the quantum computer runs just long
enough to sprinkle some quantum magic into the solution.
Although its usefulness is disputed, this algorithm is highly flexible,
leading to quantum variants of classifiers, neural networks, and support
vector machines. Variants of this algorithm may be found under different
names, such as Quantum Approximate optimisation Algorithm (QAOA),
Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), and quantum neural networks.
– Quantum annealing solves a particular subclass of optimisation problems.
Instead of using the conventional ‘quantum gates’, it uses the native
physical forces that act on a set of qubits in a more analogue way.
Annealing itself is a mature classical algorithm. The advantage of a ‘quantum’
approach is not immediately apparent, although there are claims that hard-
to-find solutions are more easily reached thanks to ‘quantum fluctuations’
or ‘tunnelling’. Quantum annealing was popularised by the Canadian
company D-Wave, which builds dedicated hardware with up to 5000 qubits
and offers a cloud service that handles relatively large optimisation problems.

Fast algorithms in search of a use case

Finally, there are algorithms with large speedups, for which we are still
looking for applications with any scientific or economic relevance. These are
classic cases of solutions in search of a problem. The most notable example
is the quantum algorithm that solves systems of linear equations3 with
an exponential advantage. This problem is ubiquitous in engineering and
optimisation, but, unfortunately, there are so many caveats that no convinc-
ing practical uses have been found. 4
Recently, much attention has gone to the algorithm for topological data
analysis (a method to assess certain global features of a dataset), which
promises an exponential advantage under certain assumptions. Again,
scientists are still searching for a convincing application.
44  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Similarly, a quantum version of a classical machine learning algorithm

called Support Vector Machines was found to have an exponential advantage
over classical methods.5 Unfortunately, this only works with a very specific
dataset based on the factoring problem that Shor’s algorithm is well known
for. No rigorous advantage is known for more general datasets.

A fourth class: Quantum-inspired algorithms

Some impressive speedups that were recently found have been ‘dequantised’:
these algorithms were found to work on classical computers too! There’s a
beautiful story behind this process, where Ewin Tang, an undergraduate
student at the time, made one of the most unexpected algorithmic break-
throughs of the decade. A great report by Robert Davis can be found on
Medium.6

What’s left?
Unfortunately, a quantum optimisation algorithm with undisputed eco-
nomic value does not yet exist; all of them come with serious caveats. This
perspective is perhaps a bit disappointing, especially in a context where
quantum computing is often presented as a disruptive innovation. Our
main takeaway is that quantum optimisation (especially quantum machine
learning!) is rather over-hyped.
That doesn’t mean that there’s no hope for quantum optimisation. Firstly,
there are good reasons to believe that new algorithms and applications will
be found. Secondly, the usefulness of the ‘slower’ quantum optimisation
algorithms ultimately depends on the speed of a future quantum computer
compared to the speed of a future classical computer. To better understand
the differences in computational speeds, we will need to quantify the amount
of ‘quantum advantage’ that different algorithms have.

3.2 How can we compare different types of speedups?

When looking at the applications of quantum computers, one should always

keep in mind: are these actual improvements over our current state-of-the-
art? Anyone can claim that their algorithm can solve a problem, but what
we really care about is whether it solves it faster. Classical computers are
already extremely fast, so quantum algorithms should offer a substantial
speedup before they become competitive.
The fairest way to compare algorithms is by running them on actual
hardware in a setting similar to how you would use the algorithm in practice.
The applications: What problems will we solve with quantum computers? 45

In the future, we expect such benchmarks to be the main tool to compare

quantum and classical approaches. However, mature quantum hardware
is not available yet, so we resort to a more theoretical comparison tool: the
asymptotic runtime of an algorithm.

What does asymptotic runtime mean?

An important figure of merit of an algorithm is its so-called asymptotic
complexity or asymptotic runtime, which describes how much longer a
computation takes as the problem becomes ‘bigger’ or more complicated.
The term ‘asymptotic’ refers to the problem’s size, which gets (asymptoti-
cally) larger, theoretically all the way to infinity.
Size turns out to be a very relevant parameter. For example, computing
54 x 12 is much easier than 231,423 x 971,321, even though in technical jar-
gon, they are instances of the same problem of multiplication, and we’d use
the very same long multiplication algorithm that we learned in elementary
school to tackle them. Similarly, creating a work schedule for a team of 5
is simpler than dealing with 10,000 employees. We typically use the letter ​
n​to denote the problem size. You can see ​n​as the number of digits in a
multiplication (like 2 or 6 above) or the number of employees involved in
a schedule.
For some very hard problems, the time to solution takes the form of an
exponential, something like ​T ~ ​2​​ n​​ or ​T ~ ​10​​ n,​​ where ​T​is the number of steps
(or time) taken.7 Exponential scaling is typically a bad thing, as such func-
tions become incredibly large even for moderate values of ​n​. For example,
brute-force guessing a pin code of ​n​digits takes roughly ​T ~ ​10​​ n.​​
There are also problems for which the number of steps scales like a poly-
nomial, such as ​T ~ ​n​​ 3​​ or ​T ~ n​. Polynomials grow much slower than expo-
nentials, allowing use to solve large problems in a reasonable amount of
time. Whenever a new algorithm can bring an exponential scaling down to
a polynomial, we may call this an ‘exponential speedup’. Such speedups
are a computer scientist’s dream because they have a tremendous impact
on practical runtimes. For example, quantum computers can factor large
numbers in time roughly ​T ~ ​n​​ 3​​(thanks to Shor’s algorithm8), whereas the
best classical algorithm requires close to exponentially many steps.9
Often, we deal with ‘merely’ a polynomial speedup, which happens
when we obtain a smaller polynomial (for example, going from T​ ~ ​n​​ 2​​ to-
wards ​T ~ n​or perhaps even a ‘smaller’ exponential function (like T​ ~ ​2​​ n​​ to-
wards ​T ~ ​2​​ n/2​​). Reducing the exponent by a factor of two (like n​​ ​​ 2​ → n​)
is also sometimes called a quadratic speedup, which is precisely what
Grover’s algorithm gives us.
46  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Here is a rough overview of quantum speedups as we understand them

today, categorised by their type of asymptotic speedup:

Exponenal
Heurisc (unknown)
Cracking RSA / ECC (Shor’s algorithm)
Some chemistry and material science Annealing (opmizaon)
Variaonal Quantum Circuits
Polynomial Some chemistry and material science
Brute-force search (Grover’s algorithm) Binary opmizaon
Differenal equaons, Lasso, … Neural Networks
NP-complete problems Support Vector Machines

No speedup
Sorng
Loading a large amount of data from
a drive

– The ‘exponential’ box is the most interesting one, featuring applications

where quantum computers seem to have a groundbreaking benefit over
classical computers. It contains Shor’s algorithm for factoring, explaining
the towering advantage that quantum computers have in codebreaking.
We also believe it contains some applications in chemistry and material
science, especially those relating to dynamics (studying how molecules
and materials change over time).
– The ’polynomial’ box is still interesting, but its applicability is unclear. Re-
call that a quantum computer would need much more time per step – and,
moreover, it will have considerable overhead due to error correction. Does
a polynomial reduction in the number of steps overcome this slowness?
According to a recent paper,10 small polynomial speedups (as achieved
by Grover’s algorithm) will not cut it, at least not in the foreseeable future.
– For some computations, a quantum computer offers no speedup. Exam-
ples include sorting a list or loading large amounts of data.
If this were the complete story, then most people would agree that
quantum computing is a bit disappointing. It would be a niche product
for hackers and a tiny community of physicists and chemists who study
quantum mechanics itself.
– Fortunately, there is yet another category: many of the most exciting claims
come from the heuristic algorithms. This term is used when an algorithm
might give a suboptimal solution (which could still be useful) or when we
cannot rigorously quantify the runtime. Such algorithms are common on
classical computers: neural networks fall in this category, and these caused
a significant revolution in AI. Unfortunately, it is unclear what the impact
of currently known heuristic quantum algorithms will be.
The applications: What problems will we solve with quantum computers? 47

In summary, the potential for economic value varies greatly across quantum
algorithms. The case of factoring has a clear and convincing speedup, but is
only useful for codebreaking (where we hope that impact is limited thanks to
the adoption of quantum-safe cryptography). In contrast, machine learning
and optimisation do tackle a broad palette of relevant problems, but the
speed advantage of a quantum computer remains uncertain in this field.
The applications of chemistry and material science fall somewhere in the
middle, with some relevant areas of applicability and concrete indications
of a practical speed advantage.

3.3 Where is the killer application?

Is there hope that we’ll find new quantum algorithms with a large com-
mercial or societal value? For a quantum algorithm to be truly impactful,
we require two properties:
1. [Useful] The algorithm solves a problem with real-world significance (for
example, because organisations can work more efficiently or because it
helps answer a scientific question).
2. [Better/faster] Using this particular algorithm is the most sensible* choice
from a technical perspective,** even when compared to all other possible
methods.

Throughout this book, we will use the term quantum utility when both
properties are convincingly satisfied.
The precise definition can be a bit finicky, so before we start searching
for utility, we need to get some technical details out of the way.

* What is ‘sensible’ (2) depends strongly on the context of the real-world

problem (1). In most cases, we care about how fast a problem is solved, but
one should also take into account the total cost of developing the software,
the cost of leasing the hardware, the energy consumption, the probability of
errors, and so forth. For example, a high-frequency trader might be happy
with a 2% faster algorithm even if the costs are sky-high and there’s a decent
chance of failure, whereas a hospital could dismiss a 200x faster quantum
approach if the costs don’t outweigh the benefits. Indeed, what is ‘sensible’ is
highly subjective. In practice, we can relax this requirement somewhat and
focus primarily on speed, which is a sufficiently complex figure of merit on
its own. Ideally, the quantum algorithm should enjoy an exponential speedup
or at least a large polynomial speedup.
48  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

** We explicitly look for technical perspectives. Otherwise, one might

also say that using a quantum algorithm is commercially the best option
because it creates good PR or because it keeps the workforce excited. Then,
perhaps, the first utility has already been reached! However, this is not the
computational revolution that we’re looking for, so we explicitly exclude
such non-technical reasons in property (2). Similarly, we don’t want to
worry too much about legal issues (‘it doesn’t comply with regulations’)
because it feels somewhat artificial to dismiss a quantum algorithm for
such reasons.

Supremacy, advantage, utility

Around 2019 and 2020, the terms quantum supremacy and quantum
advantage were popularly used when quantum computers did, for the
first time, beat the best supercomputers in terms of speed (property 2).11, 12
This involved an algorithm that was cherry-picked to perform well on a
relatively small and noisy quantum computer whilst being as challenging
as possible for a conventional supercomputer. Quantum advantage was
mostly a man-on-the-moon-type scientific achievement, showcasing the
rapid progress in hardware engineering and silencing the sceptics who still
thought quantum computing wouldn’t work. There was no attempt to have
any practical value (1).
As a natural next step, the race is on to be the first to run something
useful whilst leaving classical supercomputers in the dust. This led IBM to
coin the term quantum utility,13 which we adapted above. In the following
years, we can expect the leading hardware and software manufacturers to
maximise the amount of ‘utility’ that they could possibly squeeze out of
medium-sized quantum computers, whilst competitors will use their best
classical simulations to dispute these claims. The first battles have already
been fought: in June 2023, IBM claimed to simulate certain material science
models better than classically possible,14 quickly followed by two scientific
responses that showed how easy it was to simulate the same experiment
on a laptop.1516
It seems to us that such healthy competition is good for the field overall.
It should lead to increasingly convincing and rigorous quantum utility, from
which the end-users will eventually profit!
In parallel, there is a rapidly expanding number of press releases by
startups and enterprises that claim to create business value by solving
industrial problems on today’s hardware, often without sharing many
details. These approaches typically start with a relevant problem in mind
and hence score well on usefulness (1). However, it is questionable whether
The applications: What problems will we solve with quantum computers? 49

quantum algorithms were indeed the best option (2), and most reports
we’ve seen hardly bother to show any argumentation in this direction.
Such claims should only be taken seriously if a rigorous benchmark against
state-of-the-art classical techniques is included.

Do known algorithms provide utility?

With the quantum utility criteria in mind, we can revisit the algorithms
that were discussed before.
(1) Useful (2) Better than
classical

Optimisation: Rigorous but slow algorithms ✓ ?

Optimisation: Fast algorithms in search of a use cases ? ✓
Optimisation: Heuristic algorithms ✓ ?
Simulation of molecules and materials ✓ ?
Breaking RSA ✓ ✓

Several ‘rigorous but slow’ algorithms, most notably Grover’s algorithm,

have an extensive range of industrial applicability. However, it seems that,
in practice, other (classical) approaches solve such problems faster. The
quadratic speedup will be insufficient in the near term, and it’s unclear if
it will be in the future.
Then, we have several exponential speedups, like the algorithm for
topological data analysis, for which no practical uses have been found
(despite many scientific and industrial efforts).
Most optimistic outlooks focus on heuristic algorithms, for which the
speed advantage will become clear with maturing hardware. Nevertheless,
we judge that no optimisation algorithms can tick both boxes for quantum
utility yet.
Even for simulation of molecules and materials, it is not straightfoward
to pinpoint precisely where we can find utility. Classical computers are
already incredibly fast, and excellent classical algorithmic techniques have
been developed. Scientist Garnet Chan even gives talks that are suggestively
titled ‘Is There Evidence of Exponential Quantum Advantage in Quantum
Chemistry?’.17 The case for quantum simulation is subtle, and we elaborate on
this matter in the chapter on applications in chemistry and material science.
To the best of our knowledge, codebreaking (Shor’s algorithm) is the only
impactful algorithm that has little competition from classical methods.
Hopefully, most critical cryptography will be updated well before a quan-
tum computer arrives, making large-scale deployment of Shor’s algorithm
50  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

relatively uninteresting. Either way, the application of codebreaking is not

quite the positive innovation that quantum enthusiasts are looking for.
Could the nature of quantum mechanics be such that exponential
speedups are only found in codebreaking, chemistry, and a bunch of highly
artificial toy problems, but nowhere else in the broad spectrum of practi-
cally relevant challenges? Most people would argue that such a scenario
is unlikely. There are still high hopes that either some of the caveats with
existing algorithms will be addressed or that new breakthrough algorithms
will be discovered.
How optimistic you are about quantum computing should depend on
(at least) the following questions:
– How impactful will heuristic and to-be-discovered algorithms be com-
pared to classical algorithms? In other words, what is the algorithmic
potential of quantum computing?
– How will quantum hardware develop relative to classical hardware?

Ultimately, the commercial success of quantum computers depends strongly

on these questions. If we allow ourselves to do some more hypothetical
dreaming, we imagine that the following future scenarios could be possible,
on a spectrum of optimism versus pessimism:

Starting on the pessimistic side, if one believes that optimisation algorithms

turn out to be lacklustre, then quantum computing might remain a niche
for academics. However, depending on the utility of more widely applicable
algorithms, one might predict that quantum computers will be installed in
special-purpose computing facilities or, even more optimistically, that they
The applications: What problems will we solve with quantum computers? 51

become increasingly common additions to data centres (much like GPUs

today). Where would you place yourself in this figure?

3.4 Further reading

‘The Potential Impact of Quantum Computers on Society’18 (Ronald de Wolf,

2017) is an accessible overview of known algorithms, together with an
assessment of how we can ensure a mostly positive net effect on society.

‘Quantum Algorithms: An Overview’19 (Ashley Montanaro, 2016) is a

more technical overview paper that describes a selection of impactful
algorithms in greater detail.

Professor Scott Aaronson warns us to ‘Read The Fine

Print’ of optimisation algorithms. [Appeared in Nature
Physics, with paywall]

Professor Sanker Das Sarma warns of hype within the field of quantum
optimisation and machine learning.

(Technical) A quantitative analysis of Grover’s runtime compared to today’s

supercomputers.

(Scientific paper) Amazon researchers lay out a comprehensive list of

end-to-end complexities of nearly every known quantum algorithm.
52  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

3.5 Notes

1. Jordan, S. (2024) Quantum Algorithm Zoo. https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org.

2. Gidney, C. and M. Ekerå (2021) ‘How to Factor 2048 Bit RSA Integers in 8 Hours Using
20 Million Noisy Qubits’, Quantum, 5, p. 433. https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2021-04-15-433.
3. Harrow, Aram W, Avinatan Hassidim, and Seth Lloyd (2008). ‘Quantum Algorithm
for Linear Systems of Equations’. Physical Review Letters, 103 (15) 150502. https://doi.
org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.150502
4. Aaronson, S. (2015). Read the fine print. Nature Physics, 11(4), 291–293. https://doi.
org/10.1038/nphys3272. Open access: https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/qml.pdf.
5. Liu, Y., Arunachalam, S., & Temme, K. (2021). A rigorous and robust quantum speed-
up in supervised machine learning. Nature Physics, 17(9), 1013–1017. https://doi.
org/10.1038/s41567-021-01287-z
6. Qiskit. ‘How Ewin Tang’s Dequantized Algorithms Are Helping Quantum Algorithm
Researchers’. Qiskit (blog), 15 March 2023. https://medium.com/qiskit/how-ewin-
tangs-dequantized-algorithms-are-helping-quantum-algorithm-researchers-
3821d3e29c65.
7. With the symbol ​~​we mean ‘roughly proportional to’. It allows us to write down
an approximation of a function, making them easier to read, throwing away some
details are not important here.
8. You may find even sources stating that Shor’s algorithm takes a time proportional
to n2 log(n). Such scaling is theoretically possible but relies on asymptotic optimisa-
tions that are unlikely to be used in practice.
9. Technically, the best algorithms for factoring, like the general number field sieve,
have a scaling behaviour that lies between polynomial and exponential. Hence,
the speedup of Shor’s algorithm is technically a bit less than ‘exponential’ – a more
correct term would be ‘superpolynomial’. Still, this book (and many other sources)
continue to use the term ‘exponential speedup’ to emphasise the enormous scaling
advantage over polynomial speedups.
10. Babbush, R. et al. (2021) ‘Focus beyond Quadratic Speedups for Error-Corrected
Quantum Advantage’, PRX Quantum, 2(1), p. 010103. https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuan-
tum.2.010103.
11. Zhong, H.-S. et al. (2020) ‘Quantum computational advantage using photons’, Science,
370(6523), pp. 1460–1463. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe8770.
12. Arute, F. et al. (2019) ‘Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting
processor’, Nature, 574(7779), pp. 505–510. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1666-5.
13. Technically, IBM has a subtly different interpretation. In a blog post (see https://
www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/what-is-quantum-utlity), they define ‘utility’ as: ‘Quan-
tum computation that provides reliable, accurate solutions to problems that are beyond
the reach of brute force classical computing methods, and which are otherwise only
accessible to classical approximation methods’. In other words: a quantum computer
doesn’t have to outperform any classical algorithm, it merely has to compete with
the silly approach of brute-force search – which is almost never the best algorithm
in practise. This definition seems heavily focused on claiming utility as soon as pos-
sible. Nevertheless, if we look at the big picture, we seem to have a similar notion of
‘advantage for end-users’ in mind, so I’m happy to adopt the term ‘utility’ anyway.
14. Kim, Y. et al. (2023) ‘Evidence for the utility of quantum computing before fault toler-
ance’, Nature, 618(7965), pp. 500–505. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06096-3.
15. Begušić, T. and Chan, G.K.-L. (2023) ‘Fast classical simulation of evidence for the
utility of quantum computing before fault tolerance’. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/
arXiv.2306.16372.
The applications: What problems will we solve with quantum computers? 53

16. Tindall, J. et al. (2024) ‘Efficient Tensor Network Simulation of IBM’s Eagle Kicked
Ising Experiment’, PRX Quantum, 5(1), p. 010308. https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuan-
tum.5.010308.
17. Chan, G. (2022) ‘Is There Evidence of Exponential Quantum Advantage in Quantum
Chemistry?’ Berkeley Quantum Colloquium, 12 April. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=DZPH7ENcRLU.
18. De Wolf, R. (2017) ‘The Potential Impact of Quantum Computers on Society’, Ethics
and Information Technology, 19(4), pp. 271–276. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-017-
9439-z (open access: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05380).
19. Montanaro, A. (2016) ‘Quantum Algorithms: An Overview’, npj Quantum Information,
2(1), pp. 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/npjqi.2015.23.
4 Timelines: When can we expect a
useful quantum computer?

At a glance
The earliest commercial quantum applications will need several million
qubits, according to the most rigorous studies.
Assuming an exponential growth similar to Moore’s law, we predict that
the first applications could be within reach around 2035–2040.

The billion-dollar question in our field is:

When will quantum computers outperform conventional computers on

relevant problems?

In the previous chapter, we defined the requirements more precisely and

coined the term ‘utility’ for such an achievement.
Unfortunately, nobody can confidently answer this question today, and
past predictions often proved inaccurate. Moreover, a relevant quantum
computer won’t just appear from one day to the next: there’s a continuous
evolution where these devices will become increasingly capable. In this
chapter, we will show how we can make a rough prediction about future
timelines and discuss what will happen on the path towards large-scale
quantum computation.

Note
As an important disclaimer, this chapter is highly subjective. It’s not hard to
arrive at different conclusions simply by choosing other sources and making
different assumptions. We did our utmost best to rely on the most up-to-date
information, combining the views of the most widely accepted papers, and
making assumptions that align with the view of most experts to present a bal-
anced perspective.

4.1 What parameters are relevant?

Compared to currently available technology, we’d require a fundamental

improvement to these specifications:
– Number of qubits
56  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

– Accuracy of elementary operations (gates). This means that quantum

computers have the ability to perform long computations without making
mistakes.

Quite a few other parameters matter, such as the connectivity, the available
set of gates, the speed of operations, and so forth. In this chapter, we choose
to simplify matters by assuming that all of these other parameters are not
a bottleneck, allowing us to focus only on the number of qubits and gate
accuracies.
The relevance of accuracy is often overlooked, perhaps because this hardly
plays a role for classical computers anymore. The problem is as follows. A
computation consists of many small, discrete steps called quantum gates.
Unfortunately, even the most precisely engineered quantum computers
are imperfect, and every gate has a slight chance of introducing an error.
You can picture this intuitively as a qubit accidentally flipping from ‘0’ to
‘1’ or vice versa.1 The probability that a gate introduces such an error on
today’s hardware is around 0.1% to 1%. Sometimes, the term ‘accuracy’ or
‘fidelity’ is used for the probability of not making an error, translating into
numbers like 99.9%.
Now, a serious computation can easily use billions of gates. You can
hopefully see the issue here: for long calculations on current hardware,
the output is almost certainly garbled by errors. In fact, given a certain
error gate fidelity, there is a ballpark maximum number of steps that can
be reasonably performed. With a 1:1000 probability of error, we can do
roughly a thousand steps, and if the error is one in a million, we can do
approximately a million gates. To solve increasingly complex problems, we
not only need to increase the number of qubits, but we also need to reduce
the likelihood of errors.
We should take a moment to appreciate the enormous challenge ahead
of us. It took decades of engineering to minimise errors to about one in a
thousand. Now, we should bring this rate down to one in billions. That’s a
huge gap that likely cannot be covered by hardware improvements alone
– even a breakthrough that reduces errors by 100x wouldn’t cut it.

Balancing qubits and accuracies

Fortunately, a technique exists that shrinks the probability of mistakes
by any desired amount: error correction. It works roughly as follows. For
every qubit that an algorithm requires, we don’t just build a single hardware
qubit, rather, we dedicate a large number of qubits, like a hundred or a
thousand. We use the term physical qubits for the actual qubits present in
Timelines: When can we expec t a useful quantum computer? 57

the hardware, whereas the virtual error-mitigated ones are named logical
qubits.
For example, suppose we have a device with a million physical qubits. In
that case, we might group a hundred of these to form a more error-resilient
logical qubit, leaving a programmer with just 10,000 logical qubits to use.
The image below shows a similar situation with a ratio of 1:12 between
logical and physical qubits.

For error correction to work, we need to make several assumptions. For

example, depending on the precise error correction protocol, gate fideli-
ties need to be quite good to start with – numbers like 99.99% are often
mentioned. This means that, as of 2024, the world’s best devices would still
need to improve gate fidelities by more or less a factor of 1​ 0​. Moreover, qubits
need to be routinely measured and reset, and large amounts of classical
processing are needed to deduce precisely how to repair a given error. These
are significant engineering challenges, but experts are optimistic that this
can be achieved. We discuss many more details in a separate chapter on
error correction.
For now, let’s take for granted that we can somehow reach any desired
accuracy (or any desired computation length) by simply adding sufficiently
many physical qubits. Then, we can greatly simplify our analysis! For each
application, we will forget about errors altogether and only count the number
of physical qubits needed.
This leads to an interesting situation. To solve larger, more complex
problems, we’ll need more qubits for two reasons: to store more data and
to reduce the probability of errors so that the computation can run longer.
Isn’t the focus on just qubits a bit short-sighted? Doesn’t this create a
perverse incentive for manufacturers to focus only on qubit numbers, forget-
ting about all the other parameters? Well, we would certainly be worried
that some companies can make headlines with unusable computers that
happen to have a record qubit number. Fortunately, most manufacturers
seem dedicated to making the most ‘useful’ computers, and customers will
58  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

surely judge their products by the capabilities of their logical qubits. We’re
obviously making a coarse simplification here, but making predictions
about the future is hard enough as it is.
Back to the main question: When can we expect a large quantum com-
puter? Now that we’re only counting qubits, we can break our billion-dollar
question into two parts:
– How many qubits are needed?
– In what year will that many qubits be available?

4.2 How many qubits are needed?

In the previous chapter, we discussed the three main applications of

quantum computers: quantum simulation, breaking cryptography, and
optimisation.
The most concrete numbers can be given for Shor’s algorithm (breaking
cryptography), where we have a very clear problem to tackle: obtain a
private (secret) key from a widely used cryptosystem, like the RSA-2048
protocol. This is the perfect benchmark because there can be no discussion
about whether the problem is solved: one either obtains the correct key or
one doesn’t. Moreover, we’re quite convinced that even the best classical
computers can’t solve the problem (or else you shouldn’t use internet banking
or trust software updates).
A recent estimate finds that a plausible quantum computer would require
roughly 20 million ‘reasonably good’ physical qubits to factor a 2048-bit num-
ber. The whole computation would take about eight hours.2 Such estimates
require several assumptions on what a future quantum computer would look
like. In this case, the authors assume qubits are built using superconducting
circuits, which are laid out in a square grid. Error correction is assumed to
be done using the so-called surface code, assuming the best-known methods
for error correction in 2020. Note that future breakthroughs could reduce
the required time and number of qubits even further.
For chemistry and material simulation, it’s a lot harder to make such
estimates because there is not just a single problem to tackle here: one typi-
cally uses computers to gradually improve our understanding of a complex
structure or chemical reaction. This should be combined with theoretical
reasoning and practical experiments. Moreover, classical computers can
often perform the same computations that the quantum computer would
make at the cost of making certain assumptions or simplifications. There’s
a fuzzy region between ‘classically tractable’ and ‘quantum advantage’.
Timelines: When can we expec t a useful quantum computer? 59

The most concrete task in quantum simulation is to compute the energy

of certain molecular configurations. The benchmark is to obtain energies
more accurately than done in conventional experiments; one canonically
takes the ‘chemical accuracy’ of roughly 1 kcal/mol as the precision to beat.
Then, we should focus on molecules where classical computers cannot
already achieve such accuracies.
Note that the accuracy of a chemical energy should not be confused
with the accuracy of a quantum gate, which is a whole different number.
A highly promising and well-studied benchmark problem is the simula-
tion of the so-called FeMo cofactor of the nitrogenase enzyme, in short,
FeMoco. This active site is relevant when bacteria produce Ammonia
(NH3), a compound that is of great relevance to a plant’s root system. A
better understanding of this process could help us reduce the ridiculously
large carbon emissions now associated with the production of artificial
fertiliser. We give more details in a separate chapter.
Simulating FeMoco is believed to require around 4 million qubits3 (and
around 4 days of computation time). The hardware and error correction
assumptions are similar to those of Shor’s algorithm: the estimate is based on
a square grid of superconducting qubits, using surface code to correct errors.
For a different enzyme, namely cytochrome P450, it has been estimated
that around 5 million qubits are needed4 (again taking roughly four days
of computation). Altogether, we conclude that a few million qubits (of suf-
ficiently high quality) can make quantum computers relevant for R&D in
chemistry.
Some tasks that are mainly of interest for scientif ic purposes, such
as simulating models of quantum magnets, can be achieved with fewer
resources. Under similar assumptions, simulating a 2D transverse field
Ising model is estimated to take just under 1 million qubits.5
For many optimisation problems, it’s practically impossible to give
reasonable estimates. As we saw previously, a true killer algorithm for
optimisation problems is not known yet. The algorithms that are presented
as the most promising are often heuristic, meaning that it’s hard to predict
how accurate their results will be compared to conventional methods.
We’ll need to test them in rigorous benchmarking once larger quantum
computers become available.
Our perspective starkly contrasts with some other sources claiming that
quantum computers are already solving practical problems today. But don’t be
fooled: these articles state that quantum computers can indeed solve relatively
simple problems but often fail to mention that there are different approaches
by which classical computers can solve the same problems much, much faster.
60  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Moreover, many of these algorithms involve optimisation problems

that have a plethora of potential solutions, but the goal is to find the op-
timal solution (say, the one that incurs the least costs or gets you to your
destination the fastest). The solution space is often so large that we don’t
even know if we hit this optimal solution, but we’re okay with finding one
that’s pretty close. Several papers claim that a quantum computer already
finds solutions faster, but in all cases, worrying sacrifices were made in the
optimality of the solutions for more complex problems.

What about D-Wave’s quantum annealer?

A particularly difficult case is the approach taken by D-Wave. This Cana-
dian scale-up manufactures a quantum computer that is purpose-built to
execute a specific optimisation algorithm called quantum annealing. With
around 5000 qubits, it can handle reasonably large problems. The bare
hardware alone doesn’t seem to perform that well, but D-Wave cleverly
combines it with classical high-performance computing in what they call
a ‘hybrid’ solver. Comparisons and benchmarks of the hybrid solution re-
port results ranging from ‘much worse’ to ‘very competitive’ relative to clas-
sical optimisation solutions. Because it is unclear to what extent the hybrid
solver actually exploits quantum phenomena and little is known about D-
Wave’s future plans, we don’t dare to make any future predictions about
annealing.

We can summarise our conclusions in the table below.

How well can we Physical

Use case Gate error
Application estimate qubit qubits
example assumed
requirements? needed

Breaking Cracking
Good ~ 20 million ~ 0.1%
cryptography RSA-2048
Simulation of
Chemistry Reasonable ~ 4 million ~ 0.1%
FeMoco
Simulation of
~ 5 million ~ 0.1 %
P450
Optimisation
Bad ? ?
/ AI

What about future improvements?

It seems almost inevitable that the above methodologies will improve.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to estimate by how much. Will we reduce
Timelines: When can we expec t a useful quantum computer? 61

the number of qubits required by a few per cent? Or by a factor of ten? By

a factor of one thousand?
Some sources actually try to extrapolate the reduction in required
qubits over time (like YouTube science educator Veritasium6 and a report
by McKinsey 7), but this is such a wonky extrapolation over a handful of
data points that we will not follow this strategy.
On the other hand, it would also be naive to stick to the numbers above
without assuming some margin for improvements. In error correction
techniques alone, there appears to be steady progress to improve the ratio
between logical and physical qubits. Based on discussions with scientists,
lowering the qubit requirements by a factor of 3 to 10 seems plausible.
Hence, for optimistic readers, we can set another target at around 400,000
qubits. Interestingly, this number is similar to the qubit requirements for
the simulation of models that are especially of scientific interest.

How well can we

Use case Qubits Gate error
Application estimate qubit
example needed? assumed?
requirements?

Simulation of
Chemistry FeMoco (with
Reasonable ~ 400,000 ~ 0.1 %
(Optimistic) 10x improved
methods)
2D Transverse
Science Reasonable field Ising ~ 900,000 ~ 0.1 %
model

Can noisy algorithms be good enough?

Current quantum computers have a limited number of qubits and are not
yet capable of large-scale error correction; they are Noisy Intermediate-
Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. An important question is: can we already
achieve any utility with such noisy devices before the era of large-scale
error correction? That is one of the most disputed topics in our field, and
therefore it deserves some attention.
A growing community of scientists, startups, and enterprises are search-
ing for such near-term applications. If successful, this would massively
increase the overall usefulness of quantum computers. Some experts seem
optimistic that this is possible, but a larger and more authoritative group
remains highly sceptical about NISQ’s utility.
In the past decades, when NISQ devices with just a handful of qubits were
just on the horizon, several consultants made ridiculous claims about how
62  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

such tiny machines would bring an exponential advantage over enormous

supercomputers. Now that the field is coming of age, many are becoming
more careful. To illustrate, when looking back at a 2021 report, consultancy
firm BCG chivalrously admits:8

Our assumptions for near-term value creation in the NISQ era, however,
have proved optimistic and must be revised.

The most serious recent claim about NISQ utility comes from the IBM team
in a paper titled ‘Evidence for the utility of quantum computing before
fault-tolerance,’9 in which a quantum simulation of a specif ic physical
system was performed using 127 noisy qubits. However, their arguments
were quickly refuted by further studies that simulated IBM’s impressive
quantum experiment on a conventional laptop.10
Maryland-based professor Sankar Das Darma expresses the view of many
academics in his opinion article ‘Quantum computing has a hype problem’.11
He stresses that ‘the commercialisation potential [of NISQ] is far from clear’,
pointing out that claims of speedups in finance, machine learning and drug
discovery have so far come with highly unsatisfying evidence.
That certainly doesn’t mean that NISQ utility is ruled out. Most experts seem
to keep an eye on the developments of NISQ applications but will agree that,
as yet, no utility for NISQ machines has been found. To illustrate, an overview
article about pharmaceutical applications12 has a careful but suggestive message:

Most NISQ algorithms […] rely heavily on classical optimisation heuristics,

and the actual run time is difficult to estimate. Furthermore, recent
results suggest that in NISQ approaches, the number of measurements
required to achieve a given error scales exponentially with the depth of
the circuit. For these reasons, here we focus our discussion exclusively
on fault-tolerant quantum computers.

Similarly, a recent overview 13 of quantum chemistry seems to remain agnos-

tic with regard to NISQ advantage while pointing out that fault-tolerance
has a higher chance of succeeding:

[I]t is diff icult to predict when or if algorithms on near-term noisy

intermediate-scale quantum devices will outperform classical computers
for useful tasks. But it is likely that, at some point, the achievement of
large-scale quantum error correction will enable the deployment of a
host of so-called error-corrected quantum algorithms.
Timelines: When can we expec t a useful quantum computer? 63

In this book, we choose to follow the view of most scientists and stick to
the well-understood use cases for early fault-tolerant quantum computers
that we discussed previously. Nobody can rule out new breakthroughs
that allow NISQ utility, but it seems unwise to count on these. A potential
scientific leap could completely stir up our fragile prediction – but so would
unexpected backlashes in hardware development or even unforeseen
funding stops.

4.3 How long until we have million-qubit machines?

Now that we’ve set our target to roughly a million qubits, we’d like to estimate
when such hardware will be available. We highlight the following sources:
1. Road maps and claims of hardware manufacturers;
2. Surveys to experts;
3. Extrapolation of Moore’s law.

What do manufacturers say?

Below, we see the qubit numbers that several manufacturers have already
realised (solid disks) and what they will produce in the future according
to their public road maps (opaque plusses). Note that the vertical axis is
logarithmic, displaying a broad range from around 10 to 10,000 qubits. A
lower number of qubits by no means indicates that these computers are
worse. In fact, the machines with the lower numbers of qubits on this graph
have an important edge in other parameters, such as gate accuracies and
qubit connectivity.
Besides their road maps, companies sometimes make more daring
claims in media interviews or at presentations at large events. Based
on the application targets above, it should come as no surprise that
manufacturers aim for around a million qubits as a ‘moonshot’ accom-
plishment. Back in 2020, IBM claimed that it would reach the 1 million
qubit target by 2030. 14 Around the same time, journalists interpreted
Google’s pronouncements as meaning that it would do this even faster
(around 202915). The start-up PsiQuantum, which made waves thanks
to record-high investments of over a billion dollars for their photonic
quantum chips, went as far as claiming that it would have a million
qubits by 2025.16, 17
It seems that these claims were too ambitious. In 2024, with only a year
to go and no publicly presented product progression, PsiQuantum shifted
its 1 million qubit road map to 2027.18 IBM took an even more conservative
64  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

The largest number of qubits demonstrated by a selection of hardware manufacturers, shown

for different years. Opaque plusses indicate manufacturers’ road maps. Data taken from publicly
available sources up until August 2024.

step, and it’s now claiming that it will have just 100,000 qubits in 203319
(although this machine should meet the error correction capabilities that
we assumed in the previous sections). Although this delay sounds disap-
pointing, hardware manufacturers are still making impressive progress, not
least because the number of available qubits grows faster than one would
predict according to Moore’s law for classical chips!
Trapped-ion machines tend to have fewer qubits but higher gate accura-
cies. Perhaps this is why IonQ displays its road map in a different format:
they aim to achieve 1024 so-called algorithmic qubits by 2028.20 This means
that IonQ will have at least this number of qubits, but it also guarantees
sufficient gate accuracy to run reasonably long circuits. It’s unclear whether
error correction will be used for this. Competitor Quantinuum recently
announced a more concrete road map,21 predicting around 100 logical qubits
in 2027. These should bring the effective gate errors down by roughly a factor
of 10. Looking ahead to 2029, Quantinuum projects thousands of physical
qubits that form hundreds of logical qubits. This might not be enough to
run the algorithms discussed earlier, but it’s not too far off either.
Timelines: When can we expec t a useful quantum computer? 65

What does Moore’s law say?

One could assume that quantum computers will ‘grow’ at a similar rate
as classical computers. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors
in a dense integrated circuit grows exponentially: the number doubles
roughly every two years. This has been a surprisingly accurate predictor for
the development of classical IT. If we apply Moore’s law to quantum, then
boosting qubit numbers from around a thousand to one million would take
around twenty years – predicting that the one million qubit mark won’t
be passed until 2044. Clearly, most hardware manufacturers are more
optimistic. If we assume the number of qubits doubles each year, then
one would predict that one million qubits will be available in ten years.
While doubling a quantum computer’s size each year is already a daunting
challenge, companies like IBM, Pasqal, and QuEra set the bar even higher
for themselves, hoping to double every 7–9 months.

What do experts say?

The Global Risk Institute conducts annual surveys asking experts to state
the likelihood that quantum computers will pose a significant threat to
public key cryptography 5 years from now. Similarly, respondents also
estimate the likeliness 10, 15, 20, and 30 years away.
66  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

This essentially boils down to the question: when will a quantum computer
run Shor’s algorithm to crack RSA-2048? We previously saw that around 20
million qubits would be needed for this (although experts may take into
account that this number can still be lowered).
We consider this an important source because many important authorities
in the field (like professors and corporate leaders) take part in this study. The
results from December 2023,22 gathered from 37 participants, are displayed
below.

Results of the December 2023 expert survey by Global Risk Institute. Figure credits: M. Mosca,
M Piani, www.globalriskinstitute.org.

How to read this graph?

Let’s look at the column labelled ‘5 years’. A total of 24 correspondents indi-
cate that there is less than 1% probability that quantum computers pose a
security threat in the next five years. A single person is quite pessimistic and
assigns a >70% chance that this will happen. On average, experts say that
there’s a fairly small likelihood that quantum computers will pose a threat
to cryptography in the next five years.
Further to the right, the ratios shift. Looking at 20 years from now, the
majority of experts believe that quantum computers pose a serious threat,
with over half of them assigning a likelihood of 70% or more.
Timelines: When can we expec t a useful quantum computer? 67

It appears that the majority of experts believe that the tipping point is
between 10–20 years from now. Somewhere between 15 and 20 years away,
there’s a point where the median participant assigned roughly 50% chance to
see a quantum computer capable of breaking cryptographic codes. However,
we should take into account a significant uncertainty: even experts make
wildly varying estimates, so there’s no obvious conclusion from this data.
These experts are almost certainly aware of hardware manufacturer’s
road maps, as we shall see below.

4.4 Putting it all together

The graph on the next page sums up our earlier findings.

Assuming that qubit numbers will grow exponentially (and that all other
parameters will keep up accordingly), we can consider several scenarios. A
pessimistic scenario would be that the number of qubits ‘merely’ follows
the classical version of Moore’s law, and qubit numbers double only once
every two years (dotted line). Then, we would have to wait until well past
2040 to reach 100,000 qubits. An even worse scenario would be if we cannot
achieve exponential growth, which would stretch the timelines even further.
An extremely optimistic outlook would follow the blue dashed line (which
extrapolates the progress by IBM, doubling their qubits every ~9 months).
If one also believes in practical applications with much less than a million
qubits, then these could be available by 2030.
An intermediate perspective is to assume that the number of qubits
doubles annually. Interestingly, this seems to approximately align with IBM’s
latest claims and the typical expert opinion. Depending on the application,
it would mean that quantum chemistry simulation and codebreaking can
be within reach between ~2033 and 2040.
To conclude, our estimates strongly depend on the assumptions that you’re
willing to accept (who would’ve thought!). Do you believe that improving
algorithms and error correction techniques will allow for applications
with much less than a million qubits? How quickly do you believe that the
hardware will improve? If you were to force me to make a prediction, I’d
say the first applications will arise around 2035, with the understanding
that there’s a considerable margin for error.
As a final remark, a full utility-scale quantum computer requires much
more than just some number of qubits. To reach the first useful applications,
we likely require simultaneous progress in algorithmics, software, gate
accuracies, error correction techniques, fridges, lasers, and many other
68  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business
Timelines: When can we expec t a useful quantum computer? 69

important subfields of quantum computing. Hopefully, all these disciplines

will find the required breakthroughs that will sustain the exponential
growth of quantum computing hardware.

4.5 Further reading

Scientist Samuel Jaques (Waterloo) makes insightful graphs that combine

the number of qubits and the error rates, and puts them in the perspective
of applications requirements.

4.6 Notes

1. Technically, quantum gates are continuous operations, so numbers like fidelity are
defined slightly differently. Still, the picture of discrete bit flips is not too far off and
will lead to the same conclusions, so we prefer this more accessible explanation.
2. Gidney, C. and Ekerå, M. (2021) ‘How to factor 2048 bit RSA integers in 8 hours using
20 million noisy qubits’, Quantum, 5, p. 433. https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2021-04-15-433.
3. Lee, J. et al. (2021) ‘Even More Efficient Quantum Computations of Chemistry
Through Tensor Hypercontraction’, PRX Quantum, 2(3), p. 030305. https://doi.
org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.2.030305.
4. Goings, J.J. et al. (2022) ‘Reliably assessing the electronic structure of cytochrome
P450 on today’s classical computers and tomorrow’s quantum computers’, Pro-
ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(38), p. e2203533119. https://doi.
org/10.1073/pnas.2203533119.
5. Beverland, M.E. et al. (2022) ‘Assessing Requirements to Scale to Practical Quantum
Advantage’. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.07629.
6. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UrdExQW0cs&t=1024s, starting at 17:04.
7. McKinsey Digital (2024) ‘Quantum Technology Monitor’. https://www.mckinsey.
com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/steady-progress-in-approaching-the-
quantum-advantage.
8. Bobier, J.-F. et al. (2024) The Long-Term Forecast for Quantum Computing Still Looks
Bright, BCG Global. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2024/long-term-forecast-for-
quantum-computing-still-looks-bright.
9. Kim, Y. et al. (2023) ‘Evidence for the utility of quantum computing before fault toler-
ance’, Nature, 618(7965), pp. 500–505. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06096-3.
10. Begušić, T. and Chan, G.K.-L. (2023) ‘Fast classical simulation of evidence for the
utility of quantum computing before fault tolerance’. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/
arXiv.2306.16372.
11. Das Sarma, S. (2022) ‘Quantum computing has a hype problem’. https://www.tech-
nologyreview.com/2022/03/28/1048355/quantum-computing-has-a-hype-problem/.
70  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

12. Santagati, R. et al. (2024) ‘Drug design on quantum computers’, Nature Physics, 20(4),
pp. 549–557. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02411-5.
13. Cao, Y. et al. (2019) ‘Quantum Chemistry in the Age of Quantum Computing’, Chemi-
cal Reviews, 119(19), pp. 10856–10915. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemrev.8b00803.
14. Hackett, R. (2020) IBM plans a huge leap in superfast quantum computing by 2023,
Fortune. https://fortune.com/2020/09/15/ibm-quantum-computer-1-million-qubits-
by-2030/.
15. Finke, D. (2020) ‘Google Goal: Build an Error Corrected Computer with 1 Million
Physical Qubits by the End of the Decade’, Quantum Computing Report, 5 September.
https://quantumcomputingreport.com/google-goal-error-corrected-computer-with-
1-million-physical-qubits-by-the-end-of-the-decade/.
16. Wang, B. (2020) ‘PsiQuantum Targets Million Silicon Photonic Qubits by 2025’,
23 April. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/04/psiquantum-targets-million-sili-
con-photonic-qubits-by-2025.html.
17. What will million-qubit computers look like in a few years? (2022) ICV TAnK-icv. https://
www.icvtank.com/newsinfo/629365.html.
18. Finke, D. (2024) ‘PsiQuantum Receives $940 Million AUD ($620M USD) to Install a
1 Million Qubit Machine in Australia by 2027’, Quantum Computing Report, 30 April.
https://quantumcomputingreport.com/psiquantum-receives-940-million-aud-620m-
usd-to-install-a-1-million-qubit-machine-in-australia-by-2027/.
19. Baker, B. (2023) IBM Details Road to 100,000 Qubits by 2033, IoT World Today. https://
www.iotworldtoday.com/industry/ibm-details-road-to-100-000-qubits-by-2033.
20. Chapman, P. (2020) ‘Scaling IonQ’s Quantum Computers: The Roadmap’, IonQ,
9 December. https://ionq.com/posts/december-09-2020-scaling-quantum-computer-
roadmap.
21. Quantinuum accelerates the path to Universal Fully Fault-Tolerant Quantum
Computing (2024) Quantinuum. https://www.quantinuum.com/blog/quantinu-
um-accelerates-the-path-to-universal-fault-tolerant-quantum-computing-sup-
ports-microsofts-ai-and-quantum-powered-compute-platform-and-the-path-to-a-
quantum-supercomputer.
22. Mosca, M. and Piani, M. (2023) Quantum Threat Timeline Report 2023. https://global-
riskinstitute.org/publication/2023-quantum-threat-timeline-report/.
5 Four myths about quantum computing

This chapter relies on a bit of quantum physics jargon. See the chapter ‘An
introduction to the quantum world’ for a quick introduction.

5.1 Myth 1: Quantum computers find all solutions at once

This myth is likely the most technical, and builds on a misinterpretation of the
concept of superposition. A single qubit can be in two states at the same time
(0 and 1), two qubits can represent four states (00, 01, 10, 11), and three qubits
are potentially in eight unique configurations simultaneously. As we increase
the number of qubits, this number of coexisting states scales exponentially!
This means that a mere 1000 qubits can effectively ‘store’ ​​2​​ 1000​​ unique
values, all at the same time. That’s an incomprehensibly large number,
much more than there are atoms in the visible universe. Even the fastest
computers in the world couldn’t loop through all these states in a lifetime.
Each of these states can be interpreted like a file on a computer, be it an
Excel spreadsheet, a web page, a CAD drawing, or whatever kind of data
we choose to work with.
A smart computer scientist can also devise a way to make 1000 bits rep-
resent ‘solutions’ to a problem. For example, imagine that we want to find
an optimal aeroplane wing that generates incredible lift while requiring as
few materials as possible. Using quantum superposition, we might represent​​
2​​ 1000​​such wings simultaneously.
We picked the example of aeroplane wings because simulating their
aerodynamic properties requires a pretty hefty computation. Let’s assume
that we have written such a computer program that accurately simulates any
wing. Let’s call that program f​ .​ It will output 1 if the wing works well (according
to whatever metric), and 0 otherwise. Surely, the program takes a very large
number of computation steps, which we’ll call T. The program will need
some input, denoted by ​x​, which is a 1000-bit description of all the relevant
properties of a hypothetical aeroplane wing. In other words, the computer
program computes ​f(​ x)​= 1​if ​x​is a fantastic wing, and f​ ​(x)​= 0​if it’s rubbish.
Now, a quantum computer should be able to execute any classical func-
tion, right? We should be able to run f​ ​ on a quantum computer, but now we
have the unique feature that the 1000-qubit input can represent a humongous
number of potential aeroplane wings at the same time. By doing a mere T
computational steps, we can check the properties of ​​2​​ 1000​​ solutions!
72  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

If this actually worked, quantum computers would have an astonishing

power. They could straightforwardly find mathematical proofs that humans
haven’t been able to solve in centuries, simply by trying all possible proofs
in parallel. They would rapidly produce the perfect train and bus schedules,
discover new drugs, and straightforwardly hack encryption systems. They
would solve problems in the complexity class NP, which is widely believed
to be impossible with machines in our universe, owing to the famous P ≠
NP conjecture.
So, what’s the catch? For those who read the introduction to quantum physics,
we shouldn’t forget about the postulate of quantum measurement. The output
of the computation would be a superposition over ​2​ ​​ 1000​outcomes. If we want to
learn anything about this output, we’d perform a quantum measurement that
collapses this superposition. Instead of looking at ​2​ ​​ 1000​different solutions simul-
taneously, we only get to see one outcome – corresponding to the performance
of just a random aeroplane wing. In this case, there is no advantage compared
to a classical computer because we could’ve just as well picked a random wing
at first, and then spent the same T steps on a (much faster) classical machine.
Although this ‘quantum parallelism’ is too good to be true, quantum
computers can use the above idea to a lesser extent. Using Grover’s algorithm,
we can find desirable solutions (the ​x​for which ​f​(x)​ = 1​) in roughly the
square root of the number of values that x​ ​can take. _ In the above example,
the number of required steps is reduced to ​​√ ​2​​ 1000​​ T = ​2​​ 500​ T​. This is an
incredible reduction, but we’re still looking at a number of steps larger than
the number of atoms in the universe – finding solutions with this brute-force
method remains far from efficient.

5.2 Myth 2: Qubits can store much more data than the same
number of classical bits

This myth is similar to the previous one: can’t N qubits represent ​​2​​ N​​ different
numbers at the same time? Or aren’t they perhaps even more powerful,
because for each of the 2​​ ​​ N​​different numbers, there is a complex amplitude,
which can have as many decimal digits as we like?
Again, by the rules of quantum measurement, this is too good to be true.
It’s impossible to store much information in a qubit because it collapses
to a classical 0 or 1 when we measure it. The problem is really in retrieving
the information, as we have very limited capabilities to do so. For the same
reason, when sending a classical message over a long distance, there’s little
value in using qubits as information carriers.
Four my ths about quantum computing 73

As a side note, there is a fascinating related protocol called ‘superdense

coding’, which you may want to look up out of theoretical interest. Also,
when your data itself represents something quantum (for example, the
state of electrons in a molecule), then storing this data in qubits does have
a potentially huge advantage.

5.3 Myth 3: Entanglement allows you to send information faster

than light or to influence objects at a distance

Entanglement is an incredibly confusing phenomenon. In particular, our

most common interpretation of quantum mechanics states that whenever we
measure one qubit, the state of another distant qubit can drastically change.
Whilst this picture is helpful for physicists when performing computations,
it tricks our intuition.
Imagine that, in the faraway future, we want to protect our solar system
against an alien invasion. We have installed sentinels on distant outposts,
which should alert Earth to any approaching dangers. Alice is one of these
noble guards stationed on a remote asteroid in the icy Kuiper Belt. She
brought with her a qubit labelled A, which is entangled with another qubit B
that’s safely kept on Earth by her colleague Bob. Whilst it takes light signals
around five hours to travel between them, isn’t there a way for Alice to alarm
Bob any faster, possibly by doing some special operations on her qubit?
Perhaps she could even give some clues about the type of looming threat?
Unfortunately, Alice cannot remotely change any measurable quantity
of Bob’s qubit. Bob’s measurements will always have the same outcome
probabilities, no matter what Alice does to her qubit. Using more qubits or
employing different quantum objects won’t help either. Fundamentally,
there is no way to signal any information faster than the speed of light.
There is a subtle difference between ‘changing measurable quantities’ and
‘knowing something’ about the state of a particle. To illustrate, assume that
we start with a particular entangled state: measuring qubits A and B will
result either in both qubits being ‘0’ or both qubits being ‘1’, let’s say with 50%
probability each. Measuring something like A= ‘0’ and B= ‘1’ is impossible.
When Alice measures her qubit and reads the outcome ‘0’, she immediately
knows the outcome of a future measurement made by Bob: she knows this
will be ‘0’ with 100% probability. However, this knowledge is not accessible
to Bob. He doesn’t even know whether Alice measured or not! Even if they
agreed in advance that Alice would measure at a set time, Bob doesn’t know
her outcome. From his perspective, ‘0’ or ‘1’ are still equally likely.
Four my ths about quantum computing 75

Something interesting happens when Alice sends a message to Bob to

inform him that her measurement returned ‘0’. With this updated knowledge,
Bob suddenly knows precisely what the state of his qubit is: it must have
collapsed to ‘0’, and he can perfectly predict the outcome of a subsequent
measurement. In a way, this did indeed change the state of the qubit from
Bob’s perspective, but it was only possible after some (classical) communica-
tion took place between Alice to Bob, a process that is limited by the speed
of light.
What is quantum entanglement good for, then? Some potential applica-
tions include:
– Creating certifiably secure encryption keys at remote locations;
– Creating certifiable randomness;
– Forming connections between separate quantum computers, allow-
ing them to send quantum data to each other using teleportation. For
this to work, devices also need to transfer some classical data, so qubit
transmission is never faster than the speed of light. Teleportation is an
intriguing method for scaling up quantum computers when a limited
number of qubits can fit on a single chip or within a single fridge.

5.4 Myth 4: Quantum computers are always ten years away.

This statement is a playful reference to the situation around nuclear fusion,

where predictions of its realisation being just thirty years in the future
have repeatedly been postponed. Scientists have been working on fusion
for decades, but it’s still far from a mature energy source.
Similarly, we’ve heard several overly optimistic claims about quantum
computers being made in the past ten years, often claiming that quantum
computers are somewhere between three to ten years away. An article in
TechCrunch1 boldly paraphrases Dario Gil (IBM) and Chad Rigetti (founder
of Rigetti Computing) saying that ‘the moment that a quantum computer
will be able to perform operations better than a classical computer is only
three years away’; this article was published back in 2018. For reference, the
127-qubit Eagle chip was announced by IBM at the end of 2021, but several
years later, it’s still primarily used for testing and education. In 2019, consult-
ing firm Gartner published ‘The CIO’s Guide to Quantum Computing’, which
indicates that 100–200 qubits are sufficient for ‘key potential applications’
in chemistry. They also predicted that ‘by 2023, 20% of organisations will
be budgeting for quantum computing projects’. Clearly, these predictions
were overly optimistic.
76  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Similarly, Microsoft made claims in 2018 that their cloud platform Azure
would feature quantum computing in five years,2 which is technically true.
However, they have repeatedly hinted at doing this with fault-tolerant
topological qubits, which currently remain elusive. Startup PsiQuantum
famously claimed that it would have a million photonic qubits by 2025,3 and
consultants at BCG advised that quantum computers would also ‘generate
business value’ in that same year.4 Again, it remains to be seen if this holds
true.
Fortunately, if you’re reading this book, you will have noticed that not
all experts share the same vision. Most scientists have warned for a long
time that quantum computing is a long-term effort.
Nevertheless, the thesis that ‘quantum computing is always X years
away’ is hard to defend, thanks to convincing evidence that we are steadily
progressing towards a clear goal. Every year, quantum hardware sees major
improvements in the number of qubits, their stability, and the level of control
that is demonstrated. Most experts even expect an exponential scaling of
the number of qubits, similar to Moore’s law, and manufacturers have clear
roadmaps that underline these predictions. Moreover, theorists have set clear
targets for when the hardware is good enough – and we’d sooner see the
requirements drop with new breakthroughs than become more stringent.
Building a quantum computer is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s impossible to
predict when ‘quantum’ will become commercially relevant, but the rapid
rate of progress is undeniable.

5.5 Further reading

(YouTube) Veritasium explains Entanglement

(YouTube, technical!) Minute Physics explains Teleportation

Four my ths about quantum computing 77

Chris Ferrie debunks more myths in his free book What You Shouldn’t Know
about Quantum Computers

Scott Aaronson shares a transcript of a public talk, explaining why he

is optimistic about the steady progress towards large-scale quantum
computers.

5.6 Notes

1. Shieber, J. (2018) The reality of quantum computing could be just three years away,
TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/07/the-reality-of-quantum-computing-
could-be-just-three-years-away/.
2. Saran, C. (2018) Microsoft predicts five-year wait for quantum computing in Azure,
ComputerWeekly.com. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252440763/Microsoft-
predicts-five-year-wait-for-quantum-computing-in-Azure.
3. Cookson, C. (2021) ‘PsiQuantum Expects Commercial Quantum Computer by 2025’,
13 March. https://www.ft.com/content/a5af3039-abbf-4b25-92e2-c40e5957c8cd.
4. Matt Langione et al. (2023) Quantum Computing Is Becoming Business Ready, BCG
Global. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/enterprise-grade-quantum-comput-
ing-almost-ready.
 Part 2

More about the

applications
6 Applications in chemistry and
material science

Perhaps the most credible application of quantum computers is to study

quantum physics itself. This deepens our understanding of microscopic
systems like molecules, atoms, or even sub-atomic particles, ultimately
leading to the discovery of new drugs, materials, and chemical production
methods. At first sight, there seems to be a significant advantage compared
to conventional computers, which struggle to store the complex quantum
state of systems with many particles. As far back as 1981, physicist Richard
Feynman ended a conference talk with a famous quote, hinting at the
opportunities of quantum computing:1

I’m not happy with all the analyses that go with just the classical theory,
because nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simula-
tion of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical.

Since then, scientists have become increasingly adept at accurately con-

trolling quantum systems. Today, universities boast a wide spectrum of
analogue quantum experiments that help us understand nature under exotic
circumstances. We’re now lining up our tools to take these simulations to
the next level: studying nature with digital quantum machines.
In this chapter, we will assess how quantum computers can impact the
fields of chemistry and material science. That makes this chapter more
technical, and we’ll assume some (very) basic background in chemistry and
physics. We discuss the most relevant algorithms, evaluate claims about
quantum computing’s benefits in the fight against climate change, and
analyse why the nitrogenase enzyme receives such widespread attention.

6.1 What problems in chemistry and material science will we

solve?

The computational problems that chemists care about typically come in

two flavours: static and dynamic problems. The most studied problem is the
static variant, where the goal is to find the arrangement(s) of particles with
the lowest possible energy. We call such an arrangement the ground state.
These states are relevant because we usually find systems in (or close to) their
82  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

lowest energy states in nature. In the context of molecules, the atomic nuclei
are relatively heavy, while the lightweight electrons move much faster and
are more prone to be entangled or in a quantum superposition. Therefore,
chemists tend to make approximations that allow them to focus primarily
on the positions and spins of the electrons: the electronic structure problem.
The other main problem is about dynamics: given some initial configura-
tion of particles, how do they reconfigure themselves after a certain amount
of time? This is often referred to as a system’s (time) evolution. Both problems
are informally referred to as quantum simulation.
We often receive the question of why it’s so hard to simulate quantum
mechanics on a classical computer. Intuitively, this hardness arises when we
deal with many particles that exhibit large amounts of superposition and
entanglement, such that the location of one particle is heavily dependent on
the (undecided) position of many other particles. We call such states strongly
correlated. Classical computers struggle because they need to keep track of
all the possible locations that particle A can be, but also all the locations
of particle B, and the same for particle C, etc. As the number of particles
grows, the number of possible configurations of these particles increases
exponentially. This means that the number of relevant amplitudes (see the
chapter on quantum physics) that a classical computer needs to process
grows very quickly. Even with a mere one hundred particles, brute-force
simulation is far beyond the capabilities of the world’s best supercomputers.
It is a common misconception that quantum computers straightforwardly
offer an exponential advantage compared to classical computers for all
chemistry problems. An influential recent paper reports2:

[W]e conclude that evidence for such an exponential advantage across

chemical space has yet to be found. While quantum computers may still
prove useful for ground-state quantum chemistry through polynomial
speedups, it may be prudent to assume exponential speedups are not
generically available for this problem.

Note that this comment is specifically about finding ground states, which,
arguably, remains the most relevant problem in chemistry. There is still
ample evidence that quantum computers offer an exponential speedup
for time evolutions.
There is more bad news for quantum computers. Over the years,
computational chemists have found brilliant approximations, hacks, and
optimisations to work around the classical computer’s bottlenecks, raising a
high bar before a quantum computer can meaningfully compete. For nearly
Applications in chemistry and material science 83

every problem in chemistry, there appears to be a clever trick to solve it

somewhat efficiently on a classical machine.
For a killer application, we likely need to search in a fairly specific niche,
right at the sweet spot where classical methods struggle while a quantum
computer excels. It is not entirely clear how large this niche is, and it is an
active research area to identify more systems where classical methods fall
short. One promising area involves multi-metal systems, where multiple
metal ions are close together. Such systems are present in biologically
relevant enzymes such as P450 and FeMoco.3 Another is in heterogeneous
catalysis, where the catalyst and reagents/products are in a different phase
of matter. 4
The first practical users of quantum simulation algorithms will most likely
be scientists who study the fundamentals of quantum systems. Physicists are
already employing devices that are similar to early quantum computers to
mimic certain classes of materials. We wouldn’t call these devices computers
yet, but rather analogue simulators. One of the first actual applications of
a fully digital quantum computer could be to analyse theoretical models
of quantum materials, such as the famous Hubbard model.5
The first error-corrected quantum computers will hopefully find their
place in industrial R&D settings. One of the first application areas could
be to better understand the aforementioned multi-metal systems, which
are relevant in the calculations of ligand binding affinities in drugs and in
understanding the mechanism behind the biological production of ammonia.
We address the latter example at the end of this chapter. Another exciting
area could be to explore the mechanism behind Type-II superconductivity
and to search for materials that become superconducting at even higher
temperatures.6 It is hard to say what the impact of quantum computers will
be beyond such niche areas, as this will depend strongly on the usefulness of
small polynomial speedups and unpredictable breakthroughs in quantum
algorithms. We see a broad palette of other impactful applications that have
been proposed, such as photocatalytic reactions (for example, efficiently
splitting water to produce hydrogen fuel),7 carbon capture mechanisms,8
the study of efficient solar cells,9 and the development of higher-capacity
batteries.10

6.2 Algorithms for quantum chemistry

We describe three of the most important quantum simulation algorithms.

The first is the Trotter-Suzuki method, sometimes called ‘Trotterisation’,
84  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

which simulates time evolution. In this case, we assume that some correct
initial state of the world is encoded in the qubits of some quantum computer.
The Trotter-Suzuki method is guaranteed to return a good approximation
of the state at a later time, again encoded in the qubit registers.
The second algorithm is quantum phase estimation (QPE), which reports
the energy of a certain quantum state and can be used to produce a system’s
ground state. As a subroutine, it requires some time evolution method, like
Trotter-Suzuki. Unfortunately, QPE can only provide information about a
certain state if it receives an input that is already a reasonable approximation
to this state. Especially in the context of describing low-energy configura-
tions, this shifts the problem to producing good candidate ground states.
The most popular algorithm for creating states with certain properties
(like very low energies) is the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE).
This is an example of a variational quantum circuit: a series of gates that
can be gradually changed until the output matches certain requirements.
Just like other variational approaches, it is a heuristic algorithm, lacking
rigorous guarantees that it will produce the desired output in a reasonable
time. However, it is a popular method today thanks to its ease of use and
the ability to work with small, noisy computers.
Creating a good approximation to a ground state is, in general, NP-hard.
This means that it is extremely unlikely that a rigorous algorithm exists that
can find the ground state of any quantum system. On the other hand, there
is good hope that more heuristic methods (just like VQE) will be found that
work well on certain subsets of systems. In fact, such heuristic methods
already form the workhorse of classical computational chemistry, with tools
such as Density functional theory (DFT), Configuration Interaction (CI) and
Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC). These work for small systems but are often
too slow to study large systems such as proteins or drugs.11 A workaround is
to apply these methods to just a small part of the target system, employing
faster but less accurate methods to oversee the larger whole.
An example of a basic workflow to find a ground state on a quantum
computer could be as follows. The first step is to train a VQE to output
states with low energy.12 These might not be the exact ground states, but
they will hopefully be similar (in jargon, they have a large overlap with the
ground state). As a second step, we append a QPE circuit, which will not
only report the energy of the VQE states, but also has a fair probability of
changing these states into perfect ground states (in jargon: it projects onto
the ground state). Running the VQE + QPE combination a few times will
almost certainly give the lowest energy states, assuming the VQE produces
proper approximations of it.
Applications in chemistry and material science 85

Further reading on simulation algorithms

Various more technical and sophisticated methods exist, for which we
refer to other more technical sources. These require expert knowledge of
quantum chemistry.

‘Introduction to Quantum Algorithms for Physics and Chemistry’ (2012),13 a

pedagogical book chapter.

‘Quantum Algorithms for Quantum Chemistry and Quantum Materials

Science’ (2020),14 a scientific overview article.

6.3 A hype around quantum computing for climate change

Some businesses make spectacular claims about how quantum computing

could be a cornerstone in solving climate change, thanks to the boost to R&D
on batteries, carbon capture, and more efficient chemical factories. However,
rarely do we see any evidence – most seem to assume that quantum comput-
ers simply spit out blueprints for revolutionary sustainable technologies.
McKinsey takes the biscuit with their report titled ‘Quantum computing
just might save the planet’.15 The article rightfully selects some of the most
impactful technologies to reduce CO2 emissions, like electrification of
transport, improved solar panels, and even vaccines that reduce methane
emissions by cattle (indeed, due to cow farts). The article concludes that
the selected innovations could reduce global warming from 1.7–1.8 °C by
2050 down to just 1.5 °C. It is a mystery to us why they throw in quantum
computing because there is no mention whatsoever about why specifically
quantum algorithms would be the key enabling factor. This exemplifies
what we see more frequently in popular articles: quantum computers are
depicted simply as insanely fast computers that will magically solve the
barriers to other new technologies on our wishlist.
What are the true prospects for quantum computing in the context of
climate change? Sceptics may point out that technological innovations alone
will not be sufficient to avert a climate disaster – we will remain agnostic
86  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

in this debate. A much more concrete issue is the mismatch in timelines.

Climate experts agree that, to limit global warming to no more than 1.5° C,
we need to act relatively soon. Imperial College London concludes on their
website,16 referencing the 2014 IPCC report:

Limiting warming to 1.5°C will only be possible if global emissions peak

within the next few years, and then start to decline rapidly, halving by 2030.

Our chapter on timelines shows that it is exceedingly unlikely that signifi-

cant quantum utility is possible anywhere before the 2030s. Additionally,
it will take several years before a computational discovery is sufficiently
mature for large-scale deployment. For this reason, we don’t see quantum
computers as a good investment against climate change, but rather as a
long-term development that can help us tackle other problems that humanity
will face in the future.
Do we really have no concrete applications in climate science? Well, we do
have some concrete leads. In the search for a killer application in chemistry,
perhaps the most-studied topic is the enzyme Nitrogenase. Its active site
is precisely a multi-metal system that classical methods struggle with,
and as we’ll soon see, it appears in reputable plans for decarbonisation. To
understand the relevance of this molecule, we need to dive into the world
of food production.

6.4 A case study of a potential killer application: FeMoco

Today’s agriculture relies heavily on the use of artificial fertilisers. Without

large-scale use of supplementary nutrients, we would not be able to sustain
intensive farming practices and feeding our world’s huge population would
be problematic. In fact, about half of the nitrogen atoms in our body have
previously passed a fertiliser factory!
Unfortunately, the production of fertiliser involves enormous energy
consumption and carbon emissions. The main culprit is the ingredient
ammonia (NH3), of which we use as much as 230 Mton per year. Although
our air consists mainly of molecular nitrogen (N2), plants cannot directly
absorb this. Instead, they rely on bacteria (or, in the case of artificial fertiliser,
humans) to perform so-called nitrogen fixation, breaking the strong triple
bond of molecular nitrogen and converting this into ammonia. Microorgan-
isms can convert this into further nitrogen-containing compounds that the
root system can absorb.
Applications in chemistry and material science 87

The chemical structure of the FeMo cofactor of the

Nitrogenase enzyme. Figure credits: Smokefoot for www.
wikimedia.org.

Pretty much all of the world’s ammonia production facilities follow the
so-called Haber-Bosch process, where hydrogen gas (H2) and nitrogen gas
(N2) react together to form ammonia. This method has the benefit that it
can be implemented in large, high-yield production lines but comes with the
disadvantage of its staggering energy consumption. The inefficiency stems
from two essential steps: first, producing sufficiently pure hydrogen and
nitrogen gasses, and later, separating the H2 and N2 molecules into individual
atoms. Breaking N2 is especially challenging due to its strong triple bond. As
an effect, factories operate at extreme conditions, with high temperatures
(~400 degrees Celsius) and high pressure (over 200 atmospheres), driven
mainly by natural gas. As much as 1.8% of the world’s CO2 emission is
caused by factories performing such reactions, consuming around 3–5%
of the world’s natural gas production!
Can’t this be done more efficiently? We strongly suspect so. Certain
bacteria are also capable of making ammonia, but in a seemingly more
efficient way, without high temperatures or high pressure. It would be
extremely valuable to copy this trick.
To imitate bacteria, we need to better understand a particular substance,
the FeMo cofactor (in short: FeMoco), which acts as a catalytic active site
during ammonia production. A perfect simulation of FeMoco is not possible
on classical computers, as the structure of roughly 120 strongly reacting
electrons rapidly becomes intractable. In 2016, researchers from ETH Zurich
88  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

and Microsoft were the first to report that a moderately large quantum
computer could come to the rescue. A few years later, Google researchers
refined the prospects even further, describing how simulations could be
accomplished with about 4 million qubits and four days of computing time.
With FeMoco, we seem to finally have an example that confidently ticks
all the boxes for quantum utility: classical methods are limited, we have
well-understood quantum methods, and computational outputs have a
significant commercial and societal impact. Unfortunately, there is yet
another catch – innovation never comes so easily. A recent article17 quotes
that industrial production of a ton of ammonia costs around 26 GJ of energy,
compared to at least 24 GJ (estimated) in bacteria. This is not the massive
reduction we were hoping for. The article concludes that perhaps the true
value lies in a better understanding of this process:

The chemical motivation to study nitrogenase is thus less to produce an

energy-efficient replacement of the Haber-Bosch process but rather because
it is an interesting system in its own right, and perhaps it may motivate how
to understand and design other catalysts that can activate and break the
nitrogen-nitrogen triple-triple bond under ambient conditions.

As a final note, we want to stress that quantum computers do not magically

spit out recipes for fertilisers, nor for medicines, batteries, or catalysts. For
real breakthroughs, we need collaborations between chemists, engineers,
and many other experts who spend several years running experiments,
having discussions, employing computer simulations, making mistakes,
going back to the drawing board a few times, and slowly converging to
practical solutions. We should not forget that quantum computers merely
provide a new set of tools. The best we can hope for is that smart people
will use them in the right way!

6.5 Further reading

(Scientific overview article) ‘Prospects of quantum computing for molecular

sciences’
Applications in chemistry and material science 89

(Scientific overview article) ‘Quantum Chemistry in the Age of Quantum

Computing’

(Scientific article) ‘Toward the first quantum simulation with quantum

speedup’

6.6 Notes

1. Feynman, R.P. (1982) ‘Simulating Physics with Computers,’ International Journal of

Theoretical Physics, 21(6), pp. 467–488. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02650179.
2. Lee, S. et al. (2023) ‘Evaluating the evidence for exponential quantum advantage in
ground-state quantum chemistry’, Nature Communications, 14(1), p. 1952. https://doi.
org/10.1038/s41467-023-37587-6.
3. Santagati, R. et al. (2024). ‘Drug Design on Quantum Computers’, Nature Physics,
20(4), pp. 549–557. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02411-5.
4. Hariharan, S., S. Kinge and L. Visscher (2024). ‘Modelling Heterogeneous Catalysis us-
ing Quantum Computers: An Academic and Industry Perspective’. ChemRxiv. https://
doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv-2024-d2l1k-v2.
5. Daley, A.J. et al. (2022). ‘Practical Quantum Advantage in Quantum Simulation’, Na-
ture, 607(7920), pp. 667–676. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04940-6.
6. Chan, G.K.-L. (2024). ‘Quantum Chemistry, Classical Heuristics, and Quantum Advan-
tage’. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.11235.
7. Leijnse, K. (2024). ‘Photocatalysis for Water Splitting’, Quantum Application Lab,
8 January. https://quantumapplicationlab.com/2024/01/08/photocatalysis-for-water-
splitting/.
8. Von Burg, V. et al. (2021). ‘Quantum Computing Enhanced Computational Cataly-
sis’, Physical Review Research, 3(3), p. 033055. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevRe-
search.3.033055.
9. Hutchins, Mark. ‘Quantum Physics, Supercomputers, and Solar Cell Efficiency’. pv
magazine International, 4 August 2023. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/08/04/
quantum-physics-supercomputers-and-solar-cell-efficiency/.
10. Choi, Charles Q. ‘How Quantum Computers Can Make Batteries Better’. IEEE Spec-
trum. https://spectrum.ieee.org/lithium-air-battery-quantum-computing.
11. Santagati, R. et al. (2024) ‘Drug design on quantum computers’, Nature Physics, 20(4),
pp. 549–557. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02411-5. Quote from this article:
‘Current classical quantum-chemistry algorithms fail to describe quantum systems
accurately and efficiently enough to be of practical use for drug design’.
12. An interesting subtlety is how we measure the energy that the VQE is supposed to
optimise. Fortunately, very short circuits exist that we can append to measure the
output states in different bases. By running the VQE a relatively small number of
times, we can make good estimates of the energy of its output states. This avoids
90  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

performing the more complex QPE during the optimisation phase. We only need the
QPE to produce an accurate representation of the state we’re searching for.
13. Yung, M.-H. et al. (2014) ‘Introduction to Quantum Algorithms for Physics and Chem-
istry’, in Quantum Information and Computation for Chemistry. John Wiley & Sons,
Ltd, pp. 67–106. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118742631.ch03.
14. Bauer, B. et al. (2020) ‘Quantum Algorithms for Quantum Chemistry and Quantum
Materials Science’, Chemical Reviews, 120(22), pp. 12685–12717. https://doi.org/10.1021/
acs.chemrev.9b00829.
15. Cooper, P. et al. (2022) Quantum computing just might save the planet, McKinsey.
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/quantum-
computing-just-might-save-the-planet.
16. How and When Do We Need to Act on Climate Change? (no date) Imperial College
London. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/grantham/publications/climate-change-faqs/
how-and-when-do-we-need-to-act-on-climate-change-/.
17. Chan, G.K.-L. (2024). ‘Quantum Chemistry, Classical Heuristics, and Quantum Advan-
tage’. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.11235.
7 The impact on cybersecurity

In the world of quantum computers, the most convincing exponential speedup

lies in codebreaking. Anyone who wants to understand the impact of quantum
computers must know the basics of cryptography. Let’s start at the beginning.

7.1 Cryptography is much more than just secrecy

Why do we actually use cryptography? Pretty much everyone will im-

mediately think of:
– Privacy/confidentiality: ensuring others cannot read your data (especially
when messages are sent over a network).

However, there are many more threats that cryptography protects us from.
Most people wouldn’t normally worry about them, but when any of the
following is missing, cybercriminals can cause a lot of harm:
– Authentication/identification: You want to verify that a message really
came from the entity that claims to send the message. For example, during
online banking, you want to be 100% sure that you are communicating
with your bank and nobody else.
Another example is when installing a new piece of software. When execut-
ing the latest Windows update, your computer makes sure to check that
there is a ‘digital signature’ that belongs to Microsoft. Imagine how unsafe
your laptop would be if anyone could send fake updates!
– Integrity: You want to verify that nobody changed the message dur-
ing transit. Imagine the damage when anyone can alter emails or file
transfers, or when the commands coming from an air traffic control
tower are modified. Similarly, any software installer confirms that the
software wasn’t changed by anyone but the original publisher, by verifying
a digital signature.
– Exchanging secret keys: How do you negotiate a new secret key with a
brand new web shop that you have never visited before? This is a seemingly
impossible task if anyone can read bare internet traffic, but modern
cryptography has a solution.

There are many other vital functionalities, like non-repudiation and avail-
ability, that we don’t discuss here. Remember the bold-faced terms above,
as we will come across these frequently.
The impac t on c ybersecurit y 93

We hope that this introduction makes you aware of the enormous impor-
tance of proper cryptography and the sheer number of cryptographic checks
required for the proper functioning of our IT. You would be surprised how
often you use cryptography on a daily basis through your laptop, phone,
car keys, or smart cards.

7.2 The quantum threat is mainly to public key cryptography

A common misconception, which we see a lot in popular literature, is that

the quantum threat can be summarised as follows. (Both of the statements
below are incorrect!)
– ‘A quantum computer will break all of today’s cryptography’.
– ‘A quantum internet is needed to keep our cryptography safe again’.

To better understand this, let’s first look at what cryptography a quantum

computer will break, and which it won’t. Later, we will look at the necessity
of a quantum internet.
In line with common cryptography jargon, we will typically have two
parties, Alice and Bob, who want to communicate with each other. We
distinguish two different types of cryptography: the symmetric and the
asymmetric (public key) variants.

In symmetric (or private key) cryptography, we assume that both Alice

and Bob already know a secret key. This could be a password that they both
know or, more commonly, a very long number represented by, say, 128 bits in
their computer memory. Alice can use the key to encrypt any message using
a cipher like AES. Bob can then use the same key to decrypt this message.
The details of how encryption and decryption work are unimportant for
our purposes. The only relevant thing is that our computers can do this
very efficiently and that it’s considered sufficiently safe: without the key,
nobody could reasonably break this encryption.
94  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

In asymmetric cryptography, more often called public key cryptography

(PKC), each participant has two keys: a public key and a private key.
The public key can be shared with anyone, while the private key must be
kept secret. That’s why we use the suggestive colours green (save to share)
and red (keep private!). If Alice wants to send an encrypted message to
Bob, she uses Bob’s public key to encrypt the message. The message can
only be decrypted using Bob’s private key, ensuring that only Bob can read
the message.
The setting with two keys offers more functionality. For example, using
public key cryptography, Alice could securely send a secret key to Bob that
they can subsequently use for symmetric cryptography, which is faster in
practice. When public key cryptography is built for this purpose, we call it
a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM).

Furthermore, the protocol works in ‘reverse’. Alice can use her private key to
encrypt a message, which then anyone in the world (including Bob) can
decrypt using the corresponding public key. Bob should then be confident that
Alice is the only person who could have encrypted this message. Indeed, some-
thing encrypted with the private key can only be decrypted with the public
key, and vice versa. The encrypted message is much like a signature that only
Alice can produce. This forms the basis of digital signatures and certificates.
The impac t on c ybersecurit y 95

You can see public key cryptography in action whenever you visit a web
page. Your browser (like Chrome or Firefox) will display that the connection
is secure, which means that it verified that the digital signature is valid,
amongst other things. This guarantees authenticity (the page came from a
registered server) and integrity (the site arrived unchanged).
It should come somewhat as a surprise that public key cryptography is
even possible at all! It’s a small miracle that encryption and decryption with
two totally different keys can be made to work, thanks to some powerful
mathematics. However, it turns out that the delicate relationship between
the two keys is also a weak spot…

How good are quantum computers at cracking cryptography?

Symmetric-key cryptography is quite safe against quantum hackers. The
biggest problems are brute-force attacks, where an attacker effectively tries
every possible secret key. Using a key size of 128 bits, the total number of
possible keys is 2128 – that’s an incomprehensibly large number, much more
than the number of atoms in a human body.
We know that Grover’s algorithm speeds up brute-force search by
reducing the number of attempts from 2 128 to its square root, which
is 2 64 . This is something that cryptographers are not happy about, but
considering the slowness and extra overhead that comes with quantum
computers, this doesn’t seem to be a problem in the foreseeable future.
Still, to be on the safe side, it is recommended to double key lengths,
hence, to use the same algorithm with 256-bit keys. Changing this in
existing IT infrastructure is relatively straightforward, although one
96  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

shouldn’t underestimate the time and costs for such changes within
large organisations.
The situation is entirely different with public key cryptography. The
most-used algorithms today, RSA and ECC, can be straightforwardly
broken by a large quantum computer. We discussed the details of Shor’s
algorithm earlier and saw that around 20 million qubits and eight hours are
needed to retrieve a secret RSA key. Fortunately, there exist PKC systems
that are believed to be safe against quantum computers, and an obvious
way forward is to start using these. We call such systems post-quantum
cryptography, and despite the confusing name, they’re built to work on
conventional computers. We discuss the rabbit hole of migrating to new
cryptography in a different chapter.
Unfortunately, even today’s communication could be at risk due to a
practice called harvest now, decrypt later. Encrypted messages that are
sent over a network can be intercepted and stored for many years, until a
quantum computer can efficiently decrypt the messages. Even though we
use public key encryption mainly to establish temporary keys for symmetric
cryptography, a smart attacker could still retrace all the intermediate steps
and retroactively spy on our communication. It is unclear at what scale
storage of sufficiently detailed internet data is genuinely happening, but it
seems plausible that security agencies of larger nations are already doing this.
The following table summarises how our cryptosystems are threatened:

Symmetric Public-key Quantum

networks
Today (AES, … ) Today PQC QKD
(RSA, ECC)

Safe against classical computers ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔

Safe against quantum computers ✔* Unsafe ✔ ✔
*with double
key lengths

Why don’t we switch to symmetric cryptography?

Public key cryptography solves a very fundamental problem: how can Alice
and Bob agree on a secret key before they have a means of encryption in the
first place? They cannot just send a new key over the internet without any
form of encryption, because anyone would be able to read this. This is the
fundamental problem of key distribution. Let us look at the functionality
offered by the two types of cryptography:
The impac t on c ybersecurit y 97

Symmetric Public-key Quantum key distribution

Confidentiality (privacy) Only with ✔ ✗

pre-shared keys
Authentication / Integrity Only with ✔ ✗
pre-shared keys
Establishing secret keys ✗ ✔ ✔*
*Only when another
mechanism takes care of
authentication.

If only we could somehow give Alice and Bob pre-shared keys in a secure way,
we would resolve most of these problems. Without public key cryptography,
there are other options:
– Trusted courier. Alice and Bob could meet every other week to exchange
USB drives with secret codes.
– Trusted third party. Alice and Bob could both trust a large ‘key server’.
If both share a secret key with the key server, they can securely ask the
server to generate a new secret key that they can use together.
– Quantum key distribution. We discuss this solution further below.

Unfortunately, trusted couriers or trusted third parties are rarely an at-

tractive alternative to public key cryptography, especially when scaling
up to networks with thousands or millions of connected users. Couriers
are simply too slow for today’s standards, and single trusted parties would
pose a particularly interesting target for attackers.

7.3 What solutions exist?

There is a clear need for post-quantum cryptography to replace com-

monly used cryptosystems like RSA and ECC. Fortunately, back in 2016,
the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
started a competition to select a new cryptosystem, which should balance
safety and practical usability (for example, it should not be too slow or
memory-inefficient). They invited experts from around the globe to propose
cryptographic algorithms, which peers assessed. Four rounds and several
broken algorithms later, NIST selected a first set of winners that are suitable
for large-scale use. As of August 2024, the first three PQC algorithms are
now official NIST standards.
98  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Even though this effort was coordinated by an American institute,

the process was backed and carried out by cryptographers from around
the world. A broad majority of cybersecurity experts have confidence in
NIST’s competition and recommend the final standards. National security
organisations from other countries like BSI (Germany) and ANSSI (France)
may prefer different algorithms but have also explicitly stated that this does
not mean that they consider NIST’s standards unsafe.
The results of the competition are as follows. Firstly, NIST selected one
Key Encapsulation Mechanism that can be used to establish secret keys over
an unencrypted connection – remember the problem of communicating
with a web shop that you had never encountered before.

Functionality NIST Name Problem family Documentation Original name

Key Encapsula- ML-KEM Module-Lattice FIPS 203 CRYSTALS-Kyber

tion Mechanism based

Secondly, NIST selected three different Digital Signature Algorithms. These

are used for authentication and integrity – remember how we don’t want
our messages to be altered in transit or how we want to prevent malware
injected in software updates.

Functionality NIST Name Algorithm family Documentation Original

name

Digital Signatures ML-DSA Module-Lattice FIPS 204 CRYSTALS-

Algorithm based Dilithium
Digital Signatures SLH-DSA Stateless Hash-Based FIPS 205 SPHINCS+
Algorithm
Digital Signatures FN-DSA Fast-Fourier FIPS 206 FALCON
Algorithm Transform over
NTRU-Lattice based

You might wonder why three algorithms were selected. Unfortunately, all
three standards come with downsides, for example, because the keys can
take up more memory or because the performance (time to sign or verify)
is worse. The real-world impact will differ per use case. ML-DSA is the main
cryptosystem recommended for general use, whereas SLH-DSA and FN-DSA
may be beneficial in specific circumstances.
The impac t on c ybersecurit y 99

Are the new standards considered safe?

The short answer is yes: the new PQC standards are considered ready for use,
and choosing algorithms such as ML-KEM or ML-DSA is widely regarded
as a sound decision. There may be exceptions in specific high-security
scenarios, but if you are operating in such a context, you are likely already
aware of these nuances.
However, there seems to be some uncertainty within the cryptographic
community regarding whether the new PQC standards will be as reliable as
our trusted RSA or ECC. The new standards have not yet stood the test of time,
and it is possible that unexpected weaknesses – whether minor implementa-
tion flaws or fundamental vulnerabilities – may still be present. To illustrate,
a PQC method called SIKE1 was in the race to become a new NIST standard
and made it all the way to the fourth round until it was proven unsafe.
To mitigate any unexpected vulnerabilities in the new standards, most au-
thorities recommend a hybrid implementation that combines the strengths
of both conventional and post-quantum PKC. Moreover, organisations are
generally advised to invest in cryptographic agility, a broad term used to
describe the ability to easily update cybersecurity defences.
The above may sound somewhat negative, but we don’t expect the slightly
lower trust to stand in the way of adoption. Cryptographic algorithms
themselves are rarely the weakest point, so it seems wise to focus on other
potential vulnerabilities instead.

What about Quantum Key Distribution (QKD)?

Quantum key distribution is also presented as a solution for key exchange,
making it a potential alternative to RSA, ECC and ML-KEM.
Still, many security authorities warn against adopting QKD today. Al-
though the idea is promising, today’s hardware is still immature. Moreover,
QKD doesn’t provide any functionality for digital signatures, thus we will
need the migration to PQC anyway.
It is somewhat of a pity that QKD is not so mature yet, because it would
be a viable weapon against Harvest Now, Decrypt Later. Nevertheless, since
a quantum threat could be here as soon as the early 2030s, experts warn
that companies and governments should fix their PQC first. At a later stage,
QKD can be considered as an add-on for further security.

What about Quantum Random Number Generators (QRNG)?

Good random number generators are exceptionally important in cryptogra-
phy, and QRNGs could provide a good alternative to the hardware random
number generators that are widely used today.
100  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

However, all they do is generate random numbers – that doesn’t make any
protocol in itself quantum-safe. As a general warning: products with ‘quan-
tum’ in the name do not automatically protect against Shor’s algorithm!

7.4 Conclusion

Cryptography is strongly intertwined with quantum computing through

Grover’s algorithm, Shor’s algorithm, and Quantum Key Distribution.
Security experts recommend that there is an obvious way forward:
– Replace current public key cryptography with new, quantum-safe
protocols (PQC);
– Double key lengths in symmetric cryptography.

Especially the first bullet is a major challenge. There are many legacy systems
on the internet that can not be updated so easily. Billions of devices are
all interconnected, so updating one device may cause incompatibilities
somewhere else. Moreover, PQC protocols will likely require more CPU
power, memory, and bandwidth than today’s trusted methods. Companies
may need to update the core code of hundreds or even thousands of applica-
tions. Lastly, the new protocols haven’t been tested as extensively as our
conventional methods, so it is not unlikely that new security issues will be
found. Before they are even built, quantum computers are already causing
headaches to cryptographers and cybersecurity managers.

7.5 Further reading

Cloudflare’s resource page ‘The State of the Post-Quantum Internet‘ explains

many aspects of the migration to post-quantum cryptography.

The NSA publishes recommendations on which cryptographic algorithms

should be used and sketches a concrete timeline about when governmen-
tal security systems should be updated.
The impac t on c ybersecurit y 101

The PQC Migration Handbook is a free guide for corporate managers on

how to tackle the upcoming cryptography migration, written by Dutch
research organisations TNO, CWI, and the secret service AIVD.

In the context of Harvest Now, Decrypt Later, the urgency to migrate

depends on how long your data should remain confidential, according to
Mosca’s Theorem.

7.6 Note

1. Goodin, Dan. ‘Post-Quantum Encryption Contender Is Taken out by Single-Core

PC and 1 Hour’. Ars Technica, 2 August 2022. https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2022/08/sike-once-a-post-quantum-encryption-contender-is-koed-in-
nist-smackdown/.
8 Applications of quantum networks

If we’re building computers that deal with qubits, superposition, and entan-
glement, wouldn’t these computers also need some way to send qubits to
each other? This is the dream of the quantum internet: a network parallel
to our well-known classical internet that allows the transmission of qubits.
There is a bit of a paradox here. On the one hand, a full-blown quantum
internet that stretches across the globe is very, very far away – it will require
quantum repeaters to bridge longer distances, purification mechanisms
to repair imperfections, and many more technologies that we’re only just
figuring out. On the other hand, it is often said that quantum networks
have a higher Technology Readiness Level than computing. That sounds
like a contradiction, right?
The main explanation is that there are some applications for small-scale
‘imperfect’ quantum networks, particularly in the context of cryptography.
In a sense, quantum networking applications have always been ahead
of quantum computing. Already in 1984, long before quantum computers
were seriously considered, quantum pioneers Charles Bennett and Gilles
Brassard discovered a method to securely negotiate a secret key (think of a
password) between two distant parties based on sending individual photons.
Their result is now famously known as the BB’84 protocol. Similarly, the
commercialisation of network technologies has long been ahead of comput-
ing. Early quantum startups like MagiQ Technologies and ID Quantique
were founded around the start of this century, and their first commercial
networking products were brought to the market in 2003 and 2004. This
technology, where a quantum network is used to generate a secret key at
two endpoints, is called Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) – an application
that we will address in much more detail below.

8.1 The promises of the quantum internet

There is a long list of arguments why we should be excited about the quantum
internet. Here are some of the applications that we hear most frequently:
– Clustering quantum computers: By connecting multiple smaller com-
puters, one might build a much larger computer with more combined
memory, allowing it to tackle more complex problems.
– Securing classical communication. The main contender here is Quantum
Key Distribution (QKD), sometimes dubbed the ‘unhackable’ network. This
104  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

allows two distant users to create a secret key (think of a password) that
can be used in further cryptographic applications.
– ‘Blind computing’: Encrypting data while still allowing someone else to
process it. What if you hire an Amazon cloud computer to do calculations
on your data, but you don’t want Amazon to actually see the data itself? It
turns out that you can make quantum computers do their computations
even while the data remains encrypted, with some caveats. Similarly, one
could use ‘encrypted’ software to solve someone else’s problem without
them discovering this algorithm. Such applications often go by the name
of blind computing or private computing.
– Position verification: Can you prove that you are currently at a given
location in a way that cannot be spoofed?
– Protocols with multiple parties, where not every participant can be
trusted, such as leader election or Byzantine agreement. You can find
many more in the Quantum Protocol Zoo.
– Make quantum sensors more effective. There exist proposals to com-
bine different telescopes or gravitational wave detectors, and plans to
synchronise quantum clocks.

8.2 How useful is the quantum internet in practice?

The impact of many quantum network applications will depend on how much
we will use quantum computers. If quantum computers become widespread
in the future, then communication between them also seems to be extremely
worthwhile. On the other hand, our current outlook of quantum computers
focuses on special-purpose devices used to solve isolated problems. In the
latter scenario, the value of exchanging quantum data is not immediately clear.
There is an intriguing road map to build a reliable quantum internet
in the future (involving fascinating tricks like entanglement distillation
and teleportation), but this would require multiple error-corrected quantum
computers by itself! Therefore, in this book, we’re not yet ready to look
ahead at applications like clustering computers, multi-party computations,
private computing, or making sensors more effective. Regarding clustered
quantum computers, we frequently hear arguments that one can make a
bigger quantum computer by connecting individual ones, giving us access
to larger numbers of qubits in a single calculation. It seems that building
these computers right next to each other (and calling it a single computer)
is much more effective than transporting fragile quantum data over large
distances – clustering seems useful in extremely small networks.
Applications of quantum ne t work s 105

In the foreseeable future, the first interesting applications are those that
work over a ‘noisy’ connection and transport just one qubit at a time (or
perhaps a handful of them). For practical interest, Quantum Key Distribu-
tion (QKD) is by far the most interesting application.

8.3 The case for QKD

To fully understand QKD, we require a bit more background about cryptog-

raphy, especially the key distribution. For a full account, we recommend first
reading the chapter on cryptography. In short, we’re wondering how Alice
can agree on a secret key with her distant friend Bob in a world where
everyone can read plain data sent over the internet. Surely, they can’t just
send their secrets or passwords over to each other without having any
encryption in the first place! This problem is commonly solved using public
key cryptography (which we know will be revamped in the following years).
If you really don’t trust public key cryptography, the main alternative is to
physically transport a USB stick by a trusted courier.
Compared to conventional cryptography, the unique selling point of QKD is
that it is fundamentally impossible for cybercriminals to obtain the secret key
as it is being distributed. As long as our understanding of quantum mechanics
is correct (and we’re convinced it is, as it’s arguably the most well-tested
theory in science), no amount of computational power or mathematical
breakthroughs will let an attacker gain information about the key. Of course,
this assumes that the protocol is executed precisely as prescribed and that
there are no other vulnerabilities in the actual hardware or software.
This fundamentally differs from today’s approach to public key cryptog-
raphy, which must rely on certain mathematical assumptions. We know for
sure that, with sufficient computational power, these codes can be broken,
but we argue that this takes such a painfully long time that nobody will
bother. Still, such statements about computation times are based on assump-
tions, and our trust derives from the empirical evidence that our smartest
cryptographers have not found any weaknesses yet. In fact, well-regarded
cryptosystems do get broken from time to time.

That said, although QKD is ‘unhackable’ in theory, the actual hard-

ware and software are likely to contain vulnerabilities. Contrary to
well-trusted public key cryptography, no QKD system has received proper
certif ication and accreditation, and a signif icant fraction of historical
products have been hacked.
106  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

QKD has the downside that it requires specialised hardware, although

it is much less demanding than other quantum internet applications we
mentioned. It can already be practical with a basic point-to-point network
with just two connected parties, with one party limited to sending photons
and the other limited to just measuring them. Moreover, the qubits need
only be sent and measured one at a time, so no quantum memory or exten-
sive quantum computations are needed. There have already been several
demonstrations that use standard telecom fibre (the stuff that’s already in
the ground) or satellite-based systems that communicate through air. QKD
hardware is fancy and expensive but not completely out of reach.
The fundamental downside of QKD is that it features no intrinsic way
to confirm who the person on the other end of the line is. Some form of
authentication is still needed – which is done with secret keys that should
already be present in the first place! This makes QKD just a partial solution
to the key distribution problem: it’s mostly a key extension protocol, creating
arbitrary amounts of key material based on a small initial key.

What do experts say?

Cybersecurity experts (indeed, the people who have been diligently keep-
ing our classical computers safe for decades) are typically sceptical about
QKD. In fact, all major security authorities that we are aware of currently
advise against the use of QKD. They find the use of additional, uncertified
hardware too large of a security risk and stress that there is a better solution
that works on conventional computers: post-quantum cryptography (PQC).
From their perspective, PQC offers all the required functionalities, and is
currently more practical to test, certify and implement.
Be careful not to confuse the abbreviations PQC and QKD. QKD is about
communication with a fancy quantum network. PQC runs on conventional
hardware. You may call both of them ‘quantum-safe’ cryptography, as they
should both resist attacks from a large-scale quantum computer.
A fair argument in favour of QKD stems from the harvest now, decrypt
later attacks that could be done today. These imply that even the privacy of
today’s messages is at risk, which could be an argument for organisations
to rapidly switch to QKD to protect their most sensitive data. Still, for those
willing to go the extra mile for their privacy, looking at more mature and
readily available solutions might be more worthwhile. For example, there exist
certified solutions that rely on symmetric encryption with trusted couriers.
What’s left is a niche use case for the most forward-thinking organisations
that deal with fierce security requirements. It is a pity that QKD is not so
mature today, as many organisations will start a migration to quantum-safe
Applications of quantum ne t work s 107

cryptography soon. Widespread adoption of QKD would likely lower the

costs of quantum networks and make it easier to expand to a large-scale
quantum internet in the future. Nevertheless, since a quantum threat could
be here as soon as the early 2030s, we stick with the recommendation to
migrate to post-quantum cryptography first and to consider QKD as an
add-on for additional security later, if needed.

8.4 Conclusion

In conclusion, most applications of a quantum internet will not be im-

mediately relevant in the foreseeable future, with an exception for QKD.
And even QKD might not be the killer applications that many investors are
hoping for – it most definitely shouldn’t be called ‘unhackable’.
Still, it seems unfair to dismiss a quantum internet because it would be
‘too technologically challenging’ or ‘too expensive’. These arguments are
correct today but could be naive on a scale of several decades. Would anyone
from the 1970s have believed that today, almost everyone on the globe is
streaming videos on a mobile phone for just a few dollars per month? Who
knows what the quantum internet will look like thirty years from now?

8.5 Further reading

Much more about the various quantum network

applications can be found in an online Quantum
Internet magazine by TU Delft or on the website of
the Quantum Internet Alliance.

A video explanation of QKD for laymen or experts.

A nature commentary on why practical long-range QKD is still out of reach.

9 Optimisation and AI: What are
companies doing today?

The earlier chapter on quantum applications discussed whether quan-

tum computers can offer practical speedups for optimisation and AI. We
concluded that this is a subtle case and that it is still unclear how much
utility quantum computers can provide in these fields. Still, a large body
of literature claims some form of near-term speedup in specific quantum
applications. What’s really going on here?
This chapter aims to build a more detailed intuition of how different
organisations are exploring quantum applications. We will assess some
example research papers, examine the problems they tackle, and analyse
how convincingly they point to quantum utility. Moreover, we will look at
the most fruitful directions for finding new and useful quantum algorithms.
But before we dive into these details, let’s take a step back and ask ourselves:
what must a quantum algorithm do to be a genuine improvement over its
classical counterpart?

9.1 Comparing Algorithms and Oranges

It is not straightforward to compare two algorithms. Perhaps one is faster

on a particular computer, while another works better on a phone. Maybe
one is best written in programming language A, and the other in language
B. Computer scientists don’t like dealing with such tedious details and
resort to simply counting the number of fundamental computational
steps an algorithm takes. In other words, they abstract away the actual
computer and see the algorithm as a purely mathematical sequence of
well-defined steps. Admittedly, the precise definition of step is still vague
and machine-dependent. Therefore, algorithms are compared by their
‘asymptotic complexity’ (or: ‘asymptotic scaling’), which describes how
the required number of steps grows as the problem becomes increasingly
complex. What do we mean by a more complex problem? Intuitively, this is
the case when an algorithm receives more data to parse, like larger numbers
to factor, more locations on a map to route through, larger molecules to
simulate, and so forth. The relative increase in the number of steps turns
out to be completely machine-independent, allowing a fair comparison.
Scientists use a systematic language to describe asymptotic scaling called
110  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business
Optimisation and AI: What are companies doing today? 111

Big O notation (see the Box ‘What does asymptotic runtime mean?’ in
the chapter on applications), making it straightforward to recognise and
compare the efficiency of algorithms.
From the perspective of asymptotic scaling, a broad spectrum of quantum
algorithms exists that could speed up optimisation tasks. Scientifically, it is
downright fascinating that these algorithms can provide such advantages,
using the laws of exotic physics to save trillions of computational steps.
However, this book is about quantum computing for business, so while we
appreciate the marvels of nature, at the end of the day, we want to know
what the most practical way to solve our problems is. No matter what abstract
mathematics says, all we care about is the actual wall clock time for our
specific niche of problems.
At this point, the competition from classical computers becomes fierce.
Today’s processors from companies like AMD or Nvidia are so incompre-
hensibly fast that a quantum algorithm must be quite special before it can
overcome the relative slowness of a quantum computer. Moreover, quantum
computers will have a fair amount of overhead from error correction that
conventional computers don’t have to worry about. If we’re looking at wall
clock time, the race between quantum and classical is much tighter!
Even when we compare classical algorithms, asymptotic complexity isn’t
always the best indicator. For example, the Coppersmith-Winograd algorithm
can multiply huge matrices relatively efficiently – asymptotically, it’s much
faster than the naïve brute-force methods used today. Large matrices are
abundant in computationally hungry fields like engineering and AI, so one
might expect Coppersmith-Winograd to be widely adopted. Nevertheless,
it appears that hardly any professional software implementations actually
use this algorithm, nor any of its relatives.1 It turns out to be difficult to
work with and enabling its speedup requires even larger matrices than we
handle today. Asymptotic complexity is a useful tool, but no silver bullet.
Moreover, the theory of asymptotic complexity is unsuitable when
comparing heuristic algorithms. For example, a class of problems that we
call ‘NP-complete’ is hard to solve in theory, while we have software tools
like Gurobi and CPLEX that solve such problems quite well on a daily basis.
The only truly fair comparison is benchmarking. It involves standardised
tests to indicate the performance of an algorithm or a machine. The tests
could be as simple as a set of reference problems that should be solved as
quickly as possible. For example, supercomputers are commonly compared
through the LINPACK benchmark, whereas algorithms for the Traveling
Salesman Problem can be tested in TSPlib. The field of AI has been playing
this game for a long time, focusing on fuzzy problems like producing natural
112  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

English texts or recognising what’s on an image – stuff that’s hard to formally

def ine in mathematics. For example, neural network architectures for
image recognition cannot be taken seriously until they have been tested
on standardised datasets like MNIST and ImageNet.
To assess the advantage of quantum computers, we’ll need to compare
them to classical machines in similar benchmarks. Unfortunately, today’s
hardware is far from adequate, and, so far, the best comparisons are based
on resource estimates and heuristic arguments. Today, it seems nearly
impossible to prove the utility of a quantum optimisation algorithm.
Nevertheless, it is not hard to find articles that boldly claim a business-
ready speedup with just a few thousand noisy qubits, and we strongly
recommend being sceptical about such sources. There are many ways in
which such results can be misleading. For example, many articles merely
report that a quantum computer can solve a problem but fail to quantify
how fast or accurate it is in comparison to the best-known classical method.
These articles can still have very suggestive titles that make one believe that a
quantum computer is faster. Sometimes, researchers compare their quantum
algorithm only to ‘weak’ contenders, like classical brute force search or a
simplified algorithm that’s rarely used in practice. Such situations are likely
to occur when analysing some obscure dataset or solving a problem that
nobody has seriously looked at before. Occasionally, a quantum algorithm
is benchmarked against a classical machine learning model trained by the
same researchers. Optimising AI methods is finicky, and such reports make
us sceptical about whether the classical method was treated just as carefully
as the quantum approach. All of these examples indicate the importance
of testing quantum algorithms against well-studied classical approaches.
This all sounds quite negative, but we still see it as a positive development
when companies perform early explorations of quantum algorithms, often
testing accessible algorithms like variational circuits on sector-specific
toy problems. Quantum computing can be incredibly complex, and it will
take time to gain experience, train a qualified workforce, and tackle all the
barriers that stand in the way of taking a quantum algorithm to production.
It would be best for the field if everyone is honest when the outcome of a
proof-of-concept is primarily a set of learned lessons, without inflating the
result as a revolutionary speedup.
To conclude, quantum algorithms will need to prove their worth in standard-
ised benchmarks, similar to how leading AI methods are assessed today. While
we are waiting for the hardware to mature, the most relevant information
comes from rigorous resource estimates. One should be careful with claims
purely based on an algorithm’s performance on relatively small-scale problems.
Optimisation and AI: What are companies doing today? 113

Further reading

The scientific paper ‘Better than classical? The subtle art of benchmarking
quantum machine learning models’ performs a systematic test on several
quantum machine learning models.

Olivier Ezratty proposes a framework to assess quantum computer case

studies.

Metriq is a platform that collects several early quantum benchmarks.

(Technical) The Quantum Economic Development

Consortium (QED-C) proposes benchmarks based on
several optimisation tasks.

Microsoft Azure features a resource estimator that helps gauge the

number of qubits and the amount of time needed to run certain quantum
algorithms.

9.2 Where should we look for a new killer application?

Well, we simply don’t know! However, some useful technical hints may be:
– We’d most likely require an exponential, a large polynomial, or some heu-
ristic speedup. This is much more likely achieved on problems where we
don’t already know very efficient classical algorithms.
– When reading data is a limiting factor (for example, in big data applica-
tions), quantum computers appear to be relatively slow. Getting the data
into a quantum computer seems to take at least as long as processing
the data on a much cheaper supercomputer. This holds, for example,
when searching through a large database, but also for data-intensive
simulations like weather forecasting.
114  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

– Similarly, if the desired output is a large amount of data (such as a very

large list or table), then a quantum computer is likely not eff icient.
Most quantum algorithms look at a global property of a function or
dataset that can be encoded in a very small output (like Deutsch-
Jozsa or Shor’s algorithm when interpreted as f inding the period of a
function).
– Some people would say that if quantum computers are not ‘faster’, perhaps
they might solve a problem ‘more accurately’ (for example, they might
produce a more reliable forecast). However, when we look at speedups,
then accuracy is already taken into account: we compare the number of
needed to achieve a given accuracy.
– Classical computers are already incredibly fast, and the bottleneck for
many real-world computational problems is not in a computer’s clock
speed. If an application does require a supercomputer today, then it’s
unlikely that anyone will invest in a quantum computer soon.

9.3 Examples of results in different sectors

To gain further understanding of the commercial applications of quantum

computers, we reach a point where we can no longer provide any generic
wisdom. The best way to understand this field is by looking at various
examples. In this section, we present three industries that are commonly
mentioned in the context of quantum applications: pharmaceuticals,
finance, and energy. For each of these, we briefly highlight typical use
cases and discuss one or two technical reports.

The reports are picked for no particular reason except that they should
provide a decent amount of technical information – much more than a
typical press release or blog post would. Moreover, these reports cover a
broad spectrum of results, tackling different problems, featuring different
types of companies, and taking different perspectives on the degree of utility
that quantum computers would offer. We limit ourselves to use cases in
optimisation and AI, because quantum simulation and cybersecurity are
already covered in more depth in different chapters.

Note
The application areas and use cases highlighted here are speculative: there is
no hard guarantee that quantum computers will offer significant advantages
Optimisation and AI: What are companies doing today? 115

for these applications. We selected the examples below because they have
notable potential, meaning that further investigation is justified (and will likely
happen in the following years).
Moreover, this section is meant to give examples, and it’s far from exhaustive.

Pharmaceutical industry & health

The pharmaceutical sector seems willing to make long-term investments,
mainly because IP and patents can be very profitable. Indeed, the larger
corporations file some 50–100 ‘quantum’ patents each year.2 Part of the
enthusiasm is justified because computational chemistry R&D is part of
their core business. The broader health industry, including parties like
hospitals and manufacturers of medical equipment, may have less focus
on quantum simulations but are still frequently mentioned.
Some of the most studied themes include:
– Computer-aided drug discovery, where a (quantum) computer simulates
how a proposed drug reacts with compounds in the human body.
In particular, quantum-mechanical interactions may be relevant
when estimating the binding strength between a drug and biological
compounds;
– Optimising strategies for drug synthesis;
– Simulation of the molecular spectra expected in NMR or spectroscopy
experiments.

Even though the chemical nature of drug design lends itself well to exponen-
tial speedups, some restraint is warranted. The most important quantum
speedups are expected for strongly correlated systems that exhibit large
amounts of superposition and entanglement. A recent overview article
states the following about drug design:3

[Classical methods] offer good-enough accuracy for most systems. This

is because most oral drugs are small closed-shell organic molecules (they
need to pass through the gut wall to be absorbed) which generally lack
strong correlation.

This leads them to conclude:

[I]f the advantage of quantum computers is limited to strongly correlated

systems, they might have limited practical significance in drug design.
116  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Nevertheless, there are still plentiful computational challenges that classical

computers haven’t solved, both in the areas of quantum simulation and
optimisation. Whether quantum computers will address just a small niche
of strongly correlated systems or prove to have broader applicability is still
an open question.

Example results

Exploring the Advantages of Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks

in Generative Chemistry
The paper is based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), where two neural networks
are trained simultaneously. One network is a ‘discriminator’, which has to detect whether a
structure (graph) of a molecule derives either from a fixed dataset or whether it is created
by the other network, the ‘generator’. By training both networks in parallel, they become
increasingly adept at their task, such that eventually, the generator mimics natural molecule
structures very accurately.
The paper constructs the GANs partially from variational quantum circuits (VQC)
and sees improvements in some benchmarks. Note that this has only been tested for rela-
tively small molecules.
My subjective view is that this looks like an overall interesting approach. The abstract does
get us sceptical due to a claim that the authors ‘demonstrate the quantum advantage of a
VQC in the discriminator of GAN’ because the VQC performs certain tasks better than a clas-
sical neural network while using fewer internal parameters. A comparison to just one self-
written classical contender is never fair. Moreover, a quantum model with fewer parameters
can still take more time and resources to train or optimise.

Press release: https://zapata.ai/news/zapata-foxconn-insilico-medicine-

university-toronto-quantum-generative-ai-for-drug-discovery/.

Paper reference: Kao, Po-Yu, Ya-Chu Yang, Wei-Yin Chiang, Jen-Yueh

Hsiao, Yudong Cao, Alex Aliper, Feng Ren, et al. ‘Exploring the Advantages
of Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks in Generative Chemistry’.
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling 63, no. 11 (12 June 2023):
3307–3318. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.3c00562.

Organisations involved: Insilico Medicine, Foxconn, Zapata.

Optimisation and AI: What are companies doing today? 117

Hybrid Quantum Image Classification and Federated Learning for Hepatic

Steatosis Diagnosis
In this work, the authors train a neural network to assess photos of livers with the aim of
diagnosing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). They compare a standard (classical)
convolutional neural network with a ‘hybrid’ model that contains a variational quantum
layer. The paper claims that the quantum version is more accurate by 1.8 percentage points.
My personal evaluation would be quite positive if it weren’t for an important detail that
the quantum layer uses just five qubits. It seems unlikely that such an architecture would
outperform classical methods in a fair comparison, especially because simulating five qubits
is trivial for a classical computer. A possible explanation is that the classical network wasn’t
properly optimised (and the paper doesn’t share the necessary details to check this). This
hypothesis seems supported by one of the paper’s own plots, where the classical model’s
accuracies drop when it gains access to more training data. This shows why it’s important to
compare algorithms on well-studied benchmarks.

Press release: https://www.einpresswire.com/article/735111499/quantum-

algorithm-outperforms-current-method-of-identifying-healthy-livers-for-
transplant.

Paper reference: Lusnig, Luca, Asel Sagingalieva, Mikhail Surmach, Tatjana

Protasevich, Ovidiu Michiu, Joseph McLoughlin, Christopher Mansell, et al.
‘Hybrid Quantum Image Classification and Federated Learning for Hepatic
Steatosis Diagnosis’. Diagnostics 14, no. 5 (6 March 2024): 558. https://doi.
org/10.3390/diagnostics14050558.

Organisations involved: Terra Quantum, University of Trieste

See also:

(Scientific overview article) ‘Drug design on quantum

computers’, https://www.nature.com/articles/
s41567-024-02411-5 (open access: https://arxiv.org/
abs/2301.04114).

(Scientific overview article) ‘Quantum Computing for Molecular Biology’,

https://doi.org/10.1002/cbic.202300120.
118  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Finance
There is an extensive body of literature on applications in the financial
services sector. Our intuition tells us that this is mainly thanks to two
top-down reasons: small algorithmic improvements can quickly lead to large
monetary gains, and institutions like banks have relatively long investment
horizons, making them more willing to invest in technologies that could
be several years away. Unfortunately, at this point, there is little evidence
for rigorous exponential speedups in this sector, so the focus is primarily
on polynomial and heuristic improvements.
Some of the most commonly studied themes include:
– Optimising investment portfolios (for high profit and low risk);
– Analysing risk and studying future market scenarios;
– Estimating the price of complex assets, such as options;
– Fraud detection.

Example results

Quantum Deep Hedging

A hedge is an investment chosen specifically to offset the potential for loss in other invest-
ments. For example, a bank with many assets in a volatile market might also invest in a sec-
tor that typically moves in the opposite direction. The problem can be cast in a conventional
reinforcement learning framework, where a computer program makes virtual investment
decisions and receives rewards depending on its performance, allowing it to learn better
strategies. Deep hedging is an existing classical method to train a good software agent us-
ing deep (multi-layer) neural networks.
This paper investigates the potential of quantum computers in this area. Amongst other
things, the authors replace certain network layers with quantum variants. Compared to the
classical approach, they achieve comparable scores while using fewer trainable parameters.
They also produce qualitatively different investment strategies, hence offering something
unique compared to the conventional approach. The new methods are tested on Quan-
tinuum’s H1–1 and H1–2 trapped ion computers using up to 16 qubits.
Our subjective interpretation is that this is an interesting and sound paper that focuses
on rigorous analysis rather than extravagant claims. As a downside, we are not aware
of any standardised benchmark in this field, nor is there evidence that the quantum
approach could lead to faster computation times (as the reduction in parameters sug-
gests).
Optimisation and AI: What are companies doing today? 119

Press release: https://www.jpmorgan.com/technology/news/jpmorgan-

chase​- qcware-evolve-hedging-for-a-quantum-future.

Paper reference: Cherrat, El Amine, Snehal Raj, Iordanis Kerenidis, Abhishek

Shekhar, Ben Wood, Jon Dee, Shouvanik Chakrabarti et al. ‘Quantum
Deep Hedging’. Quantum 7 (29 November 2023): 1191. https://doi.
org/10.22331/q-2023-11-29-1191.

Organisations involved: JPMorgan Chase, QCWare, Université de Paris

Quantum portfolio optimisation by Citi Innovation Labs and Classiq

The portfolio optimisation problem is as follows. You receive a list of possible stocks you
may invest in and a probabilistic outlook of their expected gains and volatility (i.e. the
riskiness of the stock). The gains can be correlated. Given that you’re allowed only to take a
certain amount of risk, what would be the optimal set of stocks to invest in?
In this work, the authors optimise assets using the Quantum Approximate Optimisation
Algorithm, an example of a variational quantum circuit. There are no methodological in-
novations, but the authors do a good job of combining existing building blocks into a full
end-to-end implementation: the algorithm is written in a high-level software package (by
Classiq), using real-world data (by Yahoo finance) in a standard Python data processing
pipeline (using Pandas), and running the resulting quantum program through the cloud
(through AWS, albeit on a classical simulation in this case). There is no comparison with any
classical methods.
In our subjective interpretation, this is more a marketing outing (showcasing the techni-
cal wit of the parties involved) than a newsworthy result. Nonetheless, several news outlets
picked this up, most likely thanks to the large companies involved.

Press release: https://www.classiq.io/insights/citi-and-classiq-advance-

quantum​-solutions​-for-portfolio-optimization-using-amazon-braket.

Blog reference: ‘Citi and Classiq Advance Quantum Solutions for Portfolio
Optimization Using Amazon Braket | AWS Quantum Technologies Blog’,
7 February 2024. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/quantum-computing/
citi-and-classiq-advance-quantum-solutions-for-portfolio-optimization/.
120  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

See also:

(Scientific overview article featuring JP Morgan

researchers) ‘Quantum computing for finance’,
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-023-00603-1
(open access: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11230).

(Scientific overview article featuring QC Ware researchers) ‘Prospects and

challenges of quantum finance’, https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.06492.

Energy
The energy sector is another branch where we see much enthusiasm for
quantum technologies, possibly because the sector generally focuses heavily
on new innovations to transition away from fossil fuels. It comprises various
parties involved in the production and distribution of electricity, gas, and
oil, making for a diverse community of utility organisations, petrochemical
industries, shipping companies, and many others.
We make a distinction between two types of use cases: those based on
quantum simulation (chemistry and material science) and those based on
optimisation and AI.
Optimists will point out that there is much potential for large speedups
in chemical R&D, which could be one of the earlier application areas. Com-
monly studied applications are, for example:
– The development of new battery types, which ideally have a high capacity
and low weight, cause limited pollution, are recyclable, and rely primarily
on materials that are not too difficult to acquire. Better batteries have
obvious uses in consumer electronics, electric vehicles, load balancers
and emergency power supplies.
– Efficient water splitting: refining the production of hydrogen gas from
plain water. The hydrogen itself can be used as high-capacity fuel.
– Finding carriers for hydrogen fuel. These carriers can absorb hydrogen
such that it becomes faster, easier or safer to transport.
– Simulations of nuclear fission or fusion, contributing to improved reactor
designs.

In its current state, the optimisation side has the obvious issue of relying
on polynomial or heuristic speedups. Nevertheless, there is a broad range
Optimisation and AI: What are companies doing today? 121

of high-performance computing challenges waiting to be solved. Some of

the most-studied quantum use cases include:
– Management of electricity grids. This includes balancing the load over
different cables/stations (such that currents remain in a safe range
and losses are limited), simulating exotic situations, and computing
the optimal placement of new electricity lines.
– Prediction of electricity supply and demand.
– Electricity price forecasting.
– Finding optimal sites for oil and gas extraction.

Example results

Practical Quantum K-Means Clustering: Performance Analysis and Appli-

cations in Energy Grid Classification
K-means clustering is a widely used unsupervised learning problem. Given a set of data-
points, can we group these into k different clusters, such that all the vectors in a cluster are
‘similar’? Here, ‘similar’ means that the distance between two datapoints (vectors) is small.
The paper applies this to the context of the German low-voltage electricity grid. They se-
lected 1037 regions that they call ‘subgrids’, and gathered 26 characteristics for each of these.
Example characteristics are the average (non)-renewable energy load, operating voltage,
power line thickness, and so forth. The goal is to identify subgrids that are similar, which
has applications in predictive maintenance: it can be expected that similar subgrids will
experience similar failures.
Unsurprisingly, the paper concludes that small datasets with few clusters gave the most
reliable results, as noisy quantum computers struggle with larger problems. The paper is
honest about the fact that, at this moment, quantum computers offer little advantage over
classical methods. The goal is to look ahead and build experience before executing these
algorithms on more powerful devices in the future.

Paper reference: DiAdamo, Stephen, Corey O’Meara, Giorgio Cortiana, and

Juan Bernabé-Moreno. ‘Practical Quantum K-Means Clustering: Performance
Analysis and Applications in Energy Grid Classification’. IEEE Transactions
on Quantum Engineering 3 (23 June 2022): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1109/
TQE.2022.3185505.

Organisations involved: E.ON Digital Technology, Technische Universität München

122  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

See also

(Scientific overview article) ‘Quantum Computing and Simulations for

Energy Applications: Review and Perspective’. https://doi.org/10.1021/
acsengineeringau.1c00033.

9.4 Further reading

Some news websites report on new developments

in quantum applications. For example, Quantum
Computing Report covers mostly business-oriented
news, while Quanta Magazine takes a more scientific
perspective.

The Quantum Application Lab describes how it tackles several real-world

problems with quantum computers in well-written and accessible blog
posts.

XPRIZE runs a competition to design and employ quantum algorithms that

address global challenges.

(YouTube, technical) Ronald de Wolf presents an in-depth overview of

known speedups in quantum optimisation algorithms aimed at viewers
with a strong mathematics background.

(Scientific overview article) In ‘Quantum Optimization: Potential,

Challenges, and the Path Forward’, a large group of researchers discuss the
field’s open questions and elaborate on the importance of benchmarking.
Optimisation and AI: What are companies doing today? 123

9.5 Notes

1. For example, see this discussion on StackOverflow: https://mathoverflow.net/ques-

tions/101531/how-fast-can-we-really-multiply-matrices/.
2. Newton, W. (2023) ‘Quantum medicine: how quantum computers could change drug
development’, Clinical Trials Arena, 24 February. https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/
features/quantum-computers-drug-development/.
3. Santagati, R. et al. (2024) ‘Drug design on quantum computers’, Nature Physics, 20(4),
pp. 549–557. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02411-5.
 Part 3

The hardware and

strategic actions
10 Quantum hardware

Conventional computer hardware is extremely reliable. Professional servers

are supposed to run non-stop for years without any hardware failures. If
you take a new product out of a box, you can be reasonably sure that it will
work precisely as advertised – and if does not, it should be straightforward
to replace. Moreover, classical IT is extremely well-standardised. No matter
what supplier you buy a computer from, you can be reasonably sure you can
run your favourite applications on them. Thanks to such high reliability
and clear compatibility, it is rather easy to compare different machines,
for example, by looking at speed (e.g. floating-point operations per second,
FLOPS) and memory size.
We will see that this is radically different for quantum computers. Devices
make mistakes, have limited functionalities, and memory is scarce compared
to classical computing standards. Several manufacturers focus on niche
applications, making trade-offs in certain features to enhance performance
in others. In this chapter, we take a high-level perspective at quantum
computing hardware. We address the two most important aspects:
– What functionality does a device have?
– What type of qubits are used?

10.1 Different functionalities

The f igure below shows three different functionalities that quantum

computers can have (top, red), along with some examples of products on
the market (yellow), built from different building blocks. This list is by no
means complete! It should, at best, give an indication of the current state
of the art. Let us start by taking a closer look at the functionalities.
Our biggest dream is to have a ‘universal quantum computer’. The word
‘universal’ indicates that it can execute any quantum algorithm (or, techni-
cally, it can approximate any algorithm’s output to arbitrary precision). For
comparison, your laptop, phone, and even a modern coffee machine are
universal classical computers, making them capable of running any classical
application you can think of: spreadsheets, 3D games, data encryption, and
so on. Similarly, a proper universal quantum computer is suitable for any
quantum application, regardless of whether it is already known today or
invented in the future.
128  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

The definition of ‘universal’ is blind to some details, such as memory limita-

tions (it assumes you will never run out of RAM), and omits tedious details
about software compatibility (a PlayStation game won’t run on an Xbox).
In our high-level overview, such details are unimportant: the main point is
that there also exist devices that can not run just any algorithm.

Does a universal computer need to be ‘gate-based’?

No, there are various computational models that are universal.
There are different ways to make a ‘universal quantum computer’. The
most popular way is to use a gate-based approach, where elementary op-
erations (‘gates’) change the data stored one or two qubits at a time. This
perspective is most intuitive for those used to conventional logical circuits
(with AND, OR and NOT gates), and most quantum algorithms are pre-
sented in this language. Other alternatives include adiabatic computation
and measurement-based computation, which can theoretically run any
algorithm written for a gate-based computer without issues and vice versa.
Currently, gate-based computers are by far the most widespread and ap-
pear to be the most popular approach in the race towards a million-qubit
quantum computer: nearly all large tech companies rely on this architec-
ture. There is one important exception. Some photonics startups are
working towards measurement-based computing, as this overcomes the
challenges in performing ‘entangling’ quantum gates with photons. In the
following, we will focus mostly on gate-based computers.
Quantum hardware 129

No matter what architecture or qubit type you pick, today’s technology

will only allow you to run relatively short computations. This is due to the
inherent imperfections in qubit construction and control methods. The
imperfections cause errors to accumulate, so after some number of steps,
the result is almost surely corrupted and unusable. For longer computations,
fixing errors on the fly is essential, using so-called error correction.
At the time of writing, we live in the so-called NISQ era, with Noisy
Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices. Many are theoretically fully uni-
versal, except that they are limited both in the number of qubits and, most
of all, in the number of steps they can execute. Companies like IBM, IonQ,
Quantinuum, and Pasqal all have NISQ computers available to test over
the cloud.
A universal computer is a jack-of-all-trades, but it excels at nothing.
Engineers can make special-purpose devices that improve in certain areas
(like the number of qubits or clock speed) by omitting certain functionalities.
A quantum simulator specialises in mimicking the behaviour of a particular
class of materials or molecules. The precise capabilities can be described in
the mathematical language of a ‘Hamiltonian’ that specifies which materials
qualify. For example, Harvard-spinoff QuEra offers a quantum simulator
over the cloud that mimics a quantum Ising model.1 Today’s simulators
(like QuEra’s) are fairly similar to a universal NISQ computer, missing only
a few essential ingredients, and similarly having restrictions due to noise.
Although they look similar, they are not designed to run conventional
(gate-based) algorithms.
The jargon around simulators can be a bit confusing. Firstly, the term
‘quantum simulation’ is also used when a classical computer tries to calculate
the output of a quantum algorithm. To differentiate, some prefer the term
‘emulation’ for such classical approaches. Secondly, we often hear a distinc-
tion between ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ simulation. Ironically, both approaches
tend to discretise information over discrete qubits (which we call digital). In
practice, the terms are rather used to distinguish between continuous and
discrete time steps. An analogue simulation would use longer, continuous
operations on the qubits, whereas a digital simulation uses quantum gates
that act in short, discrete bursts on the qubits.

Another special-purpose device is the quantum annealer, popularised

mainly by the Canadian scale-up D-Wave. These special-purpose devices
can solve a specific class of optimisation problems that goes by the name
of QUBO: quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation. There is a well-
developed theory of mapping various industrial problems into the QUBO
Quantum hardware 131

formalism, making annealers fairly versatile machines. However, quantum

annealers will never be able to take advantage of the various other quantum
algorithms out there: even with enough qubits, we won’t see them cracking
codes using Shor’s algorithm.

Further reading

D-Wave’s introduction to its quantum annealing platform

Scale-up Pasqal reports on a material science

simulation with 196 qubits. In another article, they
explain why an ‘analogue’ quantum simulation has its
advantages.

QuEra makes a 256 qubit simulator available over the Cloud.

10.2 Different building blocks

Another important question concerns the materials used to create qubits. Sci-
entists have cooked up several competing approaches, such as superconducting
materials, photons, individual atoms, or ions, each with their own strengths
and weaknesses. When comparing different qubits, we use the terminology
of qubit implementation, the qubit type, or (what we prefer) qubit platform.
The conventional computer electronics industry has settled on a single
choice of material and manufacturing process: essentially, all computer
chips are made using lithography on silicon wafers. On the contrary, there
is an ongoing race between wildly different qubit platforms, and it is still
unclear which will eventually be the winner — or whether we will converge
to a single winner at all.
There is fascinating physics behind the different hardware types, but we
won’t delve into that in this non-technical book (would you care otherwise
what material your classical CPU is made of?). However, as soon as you want
132  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

to test a prototype quantum program on real-world NISQ hardware, you

probably want to learn more details. Interested readers are invited to take
a look at the references below.
It is interesting to note that all these different functionalities (universal
computers, annealers, and simulators) can, in principle, be built using any
type of qubit. Returning to the figure at the top, you can see that specific
qubit platforms have been used for multiple purposes, and it’s likely that
the empty fields will also be populated in the future.

10.3 Further reading

Different types of qubits explained by Sifted.eu

Different types of qubits at IQC Waterloo

Different types of qubits on Wikipedia

A MOOC about different hardware types by TU Delft

10.4 Note

1. Gemelke, N. and Lukin, A. (2022) Hamiltonian simulation on QuEra’s 256-qubit Aquila

machine, QuEra. https://www.quera.com/events/hamiltonian-simulation-on-queras-
256-qubit-aquila-machine.
11 Error correction

At a glance
To run long computations, we need to dramatically reduce the likelihood
of error in each computational step – not just a little bit, but by a factor of
millions.
Error correction is the most effective method to achieve extremely low
error probabilities. It combines a small number of ‘physical’ qubits (think
of several hundred) into a single ‘logical’ qubit that suppresses errors expo-
nentially.
Logical qubits are still not perfect: the ‘number of steps’ that they can
survive is an important specification that determines whether they can a
particular application.

It’s 2024 and we’re seeing a major shift in the road maps of quantum com-
puter manufacturers. Several companies no longer put their bare qubits in
the spotlight, but instead focus on logical qubits. Error correction seems to
be an essential component of large-scale quantum computing, adding yet
another facet in which these devices differ from their classical counterparts.
Although this is a relatively advanced topic, we find it so important that it
deserves a dedicated chapter in this book.
As with many aspects of quantum computing, error correction can be
rather confusing. A statement (that is incorrect!), which we often hear is:

Logical qubits (or error-corrected qubits) are resilient to errors that occur
during a computation. Once we have logical qubits, we can increase the
length of our computations indefinitely.

What’s the problem here? Well, not every logical qubit is created equally.
In the near future, we expect to see logical qubits that are perhaps 2x more
accurate than today’s bare hardware qubits, and later 10x, and in the future
perhaps 1000x. Error correction is a trick to reduce the probability of errors,
but it will not eliminate errors completely. In the following decade, we
expect gradual improvements, hopefully down to error rates of 10 -10 and
below.
134  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

11.1 What is error correction?

In quantum error correction, we combine some number (think of hundreds

or thousands) of ‘physical’ hardware qubits into a virtual ‘logical’ qubit.
The logical qubits are the information carriers used in an algorithm or
application. Error correction methods can detect whenever tiny errors
occur in the logical qubit, which can then be ‘repaired’ with straightforward
operations. Under the assumption that the probability of hardware errors
is sufficiently low (below a certain error threshold), the overall accuracy
improves exponentially as we employ more physical qubits to make a logical
qubit. Hence, we obtain a very favourable trade-off between the number of
usable qubits and the accuracy of the qubits.

Doesn’t measuring a quantum state destroy the information in the qubits?

Indeed, if we naively measure all the physical qubits, we destroy potentially
valuable information encoded in the qubits. However, quantum error cor-
rection uses an ingenious way to measure only whether or not an error
occurred. It learns nothing about the actual information content of the qubit.
It turns out that this way, the data stored in the logical qubit is not affected.

Why are errors so much of a problem? How do errors screw up our

computations?
In short, even tiny errors are a problem because we want to perform an
astonishing number of quantum operations successively — think of billions
or trillions of them.
Let’s make this more concrete. A computer program is essentially a
sequence of ‘steps’, each of which a computer knows how to perform. We
say that a program or algorithm has a width, which is the number of qubits
it requires. It also has a depth, which is the number of consecutive steps
that need to be performed. You may interpret one step in early hardware
as a single quantum gate (although, in practice, gates may be performed in
parallel, making the impact of errors slightly more complicated).
Error correc tion 135

Width (number of bits)

Set a = 450
Depth (number of steps)

Compute b = a * 2

Compute c = a * b

Compute d = c + a

The concept of ‘width’ is pretty straightforward: if the computer doesn’t

have enough memory, it cannot run the program. Dealing with ‘depth’ is
harder. To run a program of 109 steps, we need to limit errors to roughly the
inverse, say, a probability of 10 -9 per step. If the error is larger, it becomes
extremely unlikely that the quantum computer will produce the correct
outcome. These are not hard numbers: a computer with 10 -10 error would
be a significant improvement (resulting in much fewer mistakes), and a
computer with 10 -8 error might be pushed to also find the correct answer
after many tries. However, as the imbalance between depth and error grows,
the probability of finding a correct outcome is reduced exponentially. We
illustrate this in more detail in the box below.

To illustrate, why do we need such small error rates?

Let’s look at a simple model of a computer, which is not unlike what hap-
pens inside a quantum computer or a modern (classical) CPU. As above,
the computer is supposed to work through a list of instructions. We can
consider various specifications of a computer:
– The available memory, measured in bits (or perhaps megabytes or giga-
bytes, if you like).
136  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

– The speed at which the computer operates, measured in steps per sec-
ond.
– The ‘probability of error’, describing the likelihood that one gate intro-
duces a mistake. This is given as a number between 0 and 1 (or a percent-
age between 0 and 100%). Many sources use the word ‘fidelity’ instead,
which can be roughly interpreted as the opposite (fidelity ≈ 1 – probabil-
ity of error). In this text, we sometimes just say ‘error’ while we mean its
probability.

In this simple model, the time taken to complete the computation equals
‘depth’ x ‘speed’. You can make the calculation faster by increasing the speed
of the computer or by writing a ‘better’ program that takes fewer steps.
The influence of errors is harder to track. For contemporary computers,
we typically don’t worry about hardware mistakes at all, as every step has
essentially 100% certainty to output the correct result. However, let’s see
what happens when this is not the case.
Assume that each step has a 1% (= 10-2) probability of error. What will the
impact be on the final computation? Below, we compute the probability to
finish the computation without any errors, for various numbers of compu-
tational steps.

Error probability: 1%

Number of steps P(success)

1 ( 0.99 )1 = 99%
100 ( 0.99 )100 = 37%
1000 ( 0.99 )1000 = 0.004 %
10,000 ( 0.99 )10,000 = 10 -44

In this simple model, we assume that any error is catastrophic. This is quite
accurate for most programs. You might argue that there is a miniscule prob-
ability that two errors cancel, or that the error has little effect on the final
result, but it turns out that such effects are statistically irrelevant in large
computations.
Now, if we improve the hardware to have an error rate of just 0.1% (=10-3),
we find the following.
Error correc tion 137

Error probability: 0.1%

Number of steps P(success)

1 ( 0.999 )1 = 99.9%
100 ( 0.999 )10 = 90%
1000 ( 0.999 )1000 = 37%
10,000 ( 0.999 )10,000 = 0.004

A 37% probability of succeeding may sound bad, but for truly high-end
computations, we might actually be okay with that. If the program results
in a recipe for a brand-new medicine or tells us what the perfect design is
for an aeroplane wing, then surely we don’t mind repeating the computa-
tion 10 or 100 times, after which we’re very likely to learn this breakthrough
result. On the other hand, if the probability of success is 10-44, then we
will never find the right result, even if the computer repeats the program
billions of times.
In the table above, we see a pattern: to reasonably perform 102 steps,
we require errors of roughly 10-2 or better. To perform 103 steps, we need
roughly a 10-3 probability of error. These are rough order-of-magnitude es-
timates, but they lead to a very valuable conclusion when dealing with
very large circuits (or very small errors): if you want to execute 10n steps,
you’d better make sure that your error probability is not much bigger than
10-n.
This simplified model assumes that an operation either works cor-
rectly or fails completely, with nothing in between. In reality, quantum
operations act on continuous parameters, and therefore, they have an
inherent scalar-value accuracy. For example, a quantum gate with 99%
accuracy might change a parameter from A to A+0.49, where it’s sup-
posed to do A+0.5. Fortunately, for our discussion, these details don’t
matter much. It suffices to see a ‘99% accurate’ quantum gate as simply
having a 99% probability of succeeding. We also overlook various other
technical details, like operations carried out in parallel, different types
of errors, native gate sets, connectivity, and so forth — these make the
story much more complicated but will not change our qualitative con-
clusions.
138  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Why don’t we just make the hardware more stable?

To some degree, we can further reduce errors by creating more accurate
hardware. However, quantum objects are so incredibly fragile that even
getting down to 10-2 errors requires some of the world’s most astonish-
ing engineering. We definitely hope to see two-qubit gate errors reduced
to 10-3 and perhaps even 10-4, but achieving targets of 10-9 seems unlikely
with incremental hardware engineering alone. On the other hand, quan-
tum error correction is incredibly effective: the error drops dramatically at
the cost of adding a modest number of qubits, which is assumed to be
scalable anyway. That’s why experts agree that error correction is the right
way forward.

Do we use error correction in classical computers too?

This might be a good moment to appreciate the incredible perfection of
classical computer chips. While doing billions of steps per second, running
for months in a row, sometimes with hundreds of cores at a time, errors in
CPUs practically never occur. We were hoping to find hard numbers on this,
but companies like Intel and AMD apparently keep this data under strin-
gent non-disclosure agreements. However, some research shows that er-
rors well under 10-20 are easily attained as long as we don’t push processors
to their limits (in terms of voltages and clock speeds), sufficiently low that
error correction is rarely needed.
Memory (RAM) for high-performance computers still frequently has built-
in error correction, and some form of CPU error correction was sometimes
used in older mainframes and (even today) in space probes.

11.2 Longer computations need more qubits

As problems become more complex, they typically require better

computer hardware, both in terms of width (number of bits) and depth
(number of steps). We illustrate this below. We def ine a number ‘N’ that
indicates the difficulty or the size of the problem. For example, we might
consider the task of ‘factoring a number that can be written down using
at most N bits’).
 Error correc tion 139

Requirements to solve a problem, depending on it’s ‘size’ N

Width (number of bits)

Depth (number of steps)

N = 10

N = 20

N = 40

[f

Remember that we’re talking about the requirements to solve a problem;

so, here, width indicates logical bits. If a computer does not have error
correction, then one logical bit is simply the same as one physical bit – or
its quantum equivalent.
For ‘perfect’ classical computers, the situation is straightforward: if a
problem gets bigger, we need more memory, and we need to wait longer
before we obtain the result. For (quantum) computers that make errors,
the situation is more complex. With increasing depth, not only do we need
to wait longer, but we also need to lower the error probabilities and, hence,
need more extensive error correction.
Let’s consider two computers for which we show the width and depth that
they can handle (where the available ‘depth’ is assumed to be 1 / ‘probability
of error’). On the left is a computer without error correction (hence, it has
a small, fixed depth). The other is an error-corrected computer that can
trade between depth and width (in certain discrete steps).
 140  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Example quantum computers

Computer 1: Computer 2:
Without error correction With error correction
Depth (number of steps)

Width (number of bits)

The computer without error correction might have enough memory to solve
a problem but often lacks the depth. Even an error-corrected computer might
not have a suitable trade-off to solve the hardest problems. Looking at the
above example, it seems that both computers can solve the N=10 problem.
Here, only the error-corrected computer can solve the N=20 problem, as
depicted below. For the N=40 problem, which would be represented by an
even larger box, the error-corrected computer might have sufficient depth
OR sufficient width, but it doesn’t have both at the same time. Hence, neither
computer could solve the N=40 problem.

Computer 1: Computer 2:
Without error correction With error correction

In terms of cracking the N=40 problem, our best bet is to upgrade the error-
corrected computer to have more physical qubits. Using error correction,
these can be traded to achieve sufficient depth (whilst also reserving just
enough logical qubits to run the algorithm).
Error correc tion 141

We have found a paradoxical conclusion here. Larger problems not only

require more memory (to store the calculation) but also more depth, which
requires more qubits again! To summarise:

‘Harder’ problems -> More depth -> Better error correction -> More physical
qubits

Once we reach an era of error correction, scaling the number of physical

qubits will still be at the top of our wishlist, as this will be the key enabler
of longer computations.

11.3 What is the current state-of-the-art?

This section is more technical and can be safely skipped. As of 2024, there
have been several demonstrations of error correction (and the slightly less
demanding cousin: error detection), but these have all been with limited
numbers of qubits and with very limited benefit to depth (if any at all).
However, we seem to be at a stage where hardware is sufficiently mature
that we can start exploring early error correction.
Below are the three most popular approaches to error correction. Each
of them can be considered a ‘family’ of different methods based on similar
ideas:
– Surface codes;
– Colour codes;
– Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes.

The surface code (or toric code) has received a lot of scientific attention, as
this seems to be on the roadmap of large tech companies like Google and
IBM. Their superconducting qubits cannot interact with each other over
long distances, and the surface code can deal with this limitation. Many
estimates that we use in this book (such as the resources required to break
RSA or to simulate FeMoco) are based on this code. It has already been
tested experimentally on relatively small systems:
Colour codes are somewhat similar to surface code but typically lack the
property that only neighbouring qubits have to interact. This makes them
less interesting for superconducting or spin qubits, but they appear to work
extremely well for trapped ions and ultracold atoms.
Error correc tion 143

LDPC codes are now rapidly gaining attention. They build on a large
body of classical knowledge and could have (theoretically) more favourable
scaling properties over the surface code.
Which code will eventually become the standard (if any) is still completely
open.

What are the main challenges?

Firstly, we would need just slightly more accurate hardware. We mentioned
a certain accuracy threshold earlier: state-of-the-art hardware seems to be
close to this threshold but not comfortably over it. Secondly, error correction
also requires significant classical computing power, which needs to solve
a fairly complex ‘decoding’ problem within extremely small time bounds
(within just a few clock cycles of a modern CPU). Classical decoding needs
to become more mature, both at the hardware and the software level. It
is likely that purpose-built hardware will need to be developed, which for
some platforms might be placed inside a cryogenic environment (placing
stringent bounds on heat dissipation). Theoretical breakthroughs can still
reduce the requirements of classical processing.
Lastly, it turns out that ‘mid-circuit measurements’ are technically chal-
lenging. Without intermediate measurements, one might retroactively detect
errors, but one cannot repair them. We should also warn that many related
terms exist, such as ‘error mitigation’ and ‘error suppression’. They might
be useful for incremental fidelity improvements, but they don’t bring an
exponential increase in depth like proper error correction does.

11.4 Conclusion

The bottom line is that one shouldn’t naively take ‘logical qubits’ as perfect
building blocks that will run indefinitely. A logical qubit is no guarantee
that a computer has any capabilities; it merely indicates that some kind
of error correction is applied (and it doesn’t say anything about how well
the correction works). A much more interesting metric is the probability
of error in a single step (in jargon: the fidelity of an operation), which gives
a reasonable indication of the number of steps that a device can handle!
144  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

11.5 Further reading

‘The Quantum Threat Timeline Report’ asked several experts what they find
the most likely approach to fault-tolerance (section 4.5).

British startup Riverlane builds a hardware chip that

decodes which error occurred on logical qubits.
They provide an accessible press release and a more
technical scientific article.

Craig Gidney (Google) has a more technical blog post on why adding
physical qubits will remain relevant in the following decades.

(Technical) Some scientific work speaks of ‘early fault-tolerant’ quantum computing, such as:

‘Early Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing’, discussing how we can squeeze

as much as possible out of limited devices.

‘Assessing the Benefits and Risks of Quantum Computers’ takes a similar width
x depth approach as we do here, but uses it to assess what applications will
be within reach first.
 12 What steps should your organisation
take?

In the previous chapters, we discussed the use cases, the threats, and
the timelines of quantum technologies. We will now look at the strategic
perspective of a typical non-quantum enterprise. We will assume a typical
large-scale organisation that does not sell IT products per se, but relies
heavily on computing infrastructure to optimise its operations, supervise
processes, communicate with suppliers and clients, and potentially invest in
computer-aided R&D. While these organisations may be excited about the
potential of quantum computing, they may also feel vulnerable – whether
due to competitors advancing ahead or due to hackers attacking legacy
cryptography.
We outline the typical process an organization undertakes in three steps.
The first steps, like growing expertise, finding adequate staff, and doing
first proof-of-concept studies, will be largely sector-independent. Further
steps can become more organisation-specific, and we will highlight several
tools for tailored assessment

Quantum applications

2a. Preparation steps 3a. Implementation

Find impactful use-cases
Sketch a road map
1. No-regret moves
Appoint a working group
Assess the urgency of PQC
Read up and learn Cryptography
Create awareness
2b. Preparation steps 3b. Implementation
Create an inventory Migrate to post-quantum
Form a migration plan cryptography

12.1 Common first steps

Step 1: Start with no-regret moves

Most companies start with early steps aimed at better understanding the
situation. These can be done with very little financial risk.
146  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Some must-do actions:

– Appoint a quantum lead or a quantum working group tasked with fol-
lowing the developments.
– Read up and learn. If you’ve come this far in this book, you’re already doing
a fantastic job. We have a separate chapter on further learning resources.
– Create internal awareness. Many employees will enjoy inspirational talks,
tours or demonstrations that academics or quantum manufacturers can
provide.

Optionally:
– Put quantum on the agenda with senior management.
– Involve collaborators, suppliers and vendors, and make your interest in
quantum known. It is to your benefit if suppliers are well-prepared.
– Participate in a workshop, hackathon, or similar event.

In terms of more concrete follow-up actions, it makes sense to split your

quantum journey into two different categories:
a. Preparing for quantum applications, where the goal is to leverage quantum
technologies to gain some competitive advantage (for example, by strength-
ening your R&D, further optimising your logistics, improving a product, etc).
b. Migrating to quantum-safe cryptography, where the goal is to keep your
IT secure against attackers with a quantum computer.

These endeavours serve very different purposes and are likely spearheaded
by different departments. Hence, it seems logical to break these down into
separate projects. We discuss further steps in both directions separately.

12.2 Prepare to use quantum applications

Step 2a: Explore use cases

At this stage, most organisations will want to make low-regret moves that get
them prepared to leverage quantum technologies fairly soon after practical
utility becomes available. Some of the bottlenecks could be the lack of
in-house knowledge, a limited available workforce, or a long timeline to
integrate quantum applications in production environments.

Must do:
– Identify the most impactful use cases in your sector.
– Sketch a road map for the coming years.
What steps should your organisation take? 147

Optionally:
– Start concrete proof-of-concept projects. Right now, these are unlikely
to offer practical utility and will likely tackle just a toy problem. How-
ever, these help build experience in setting up quantum projects and
can uncover ‘unknown unknowns’. For staff with a strong physics or
mathematics background, it is relatively accessible (and fun!) to get
acquainted with quantum programming packages and implement a first
test algorithm.
– Find strategic partners. Organisations can save costs by collaborating
on early, pre-competitive exploration.
– Create PR! We notice that many companies are actively promoting
their early results on quantum applications, even if these do not offer
significant advantages yet.
– Hire staff with a strong background in quantum technologies who
understand the market, have the right skills to lead proof-of-concept
studies, and can offer advice for strategic decisions.

Step 3a: Implementing actual applications, whenever ready

From here onwards, it gets increasingly difficult to give concrete advice, as
priorities may depend on your business and on the way the field of quantum
computing will progress. Several sources will simply tell you do ‘develop a
long-term strategy’ or similar. Others highlight the need to ‘remain agile’
to quickly adapt to this rapidly evolving field.
For inspiration or a dot on the horizon, you may think towards a com-
petence centre for quantum computing, similar to how many companies
have special departments for data science and/or AI. A concrete task could
be to elaborate on the list of impactful use cases from the previous step,
benchmarking the performance of various quantum and classical software
tools. Another task could be to professionalise an earlier proof-of-concept
project, bringing it closer to implementation in a production environment.

Identifying fruitful use cases

From a top-down perspective, it is a good exercise to identify your current
needs in high-performance computing. What do you currently spend your
computing budget on? Are there any areas where new tools in computation
or modelling could provide serious business value (for example, by being
faster, tackling bigger problems, or delivering higher accuracy)? Which
quantities would you ideally have calculated but are beyond the reach
of current computers? This results in a longlist of use cases where new
computational tools are worth further investigation. The next step would
148  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

be to research to what extent a quantum computer (or whichever other new

computational tool) offers any advantage.
We recommend this top-down approach because it can lead to conclusions
sooner, especially because it avoids studying use cases that are not worth
your time (for example, because additional computational power provides
little value).
It is also possible to take a bottom-up approach. Looking at the available
quantum algorithms, which would speed up processes in your existing IT?
Would any of them provide value for your business? This more technical
perspective requires some in-depth quantum expertise but can definitely be
worth the effort, especially if you have people with the right skills available.

The Quantum Application Lab is a collaboration between various Dutch re-

search organisations. They invite end-users to explore the benefits of quantum
computers in projects that last anywhere between three and twelve months,
ranging between a first exploration of use cases to advanced development of
quantum prototype software. Several example projects can be found on their
website: www.quantumapplicationlab.com.

Further reading

Scientists propose a framework to discover which real-world problems are

potentially accelerated by quantum computers.

Consultant Olivier Ezratty proposes a framework to assess the maturity of

quantum computing case studies.

(YouTube) A recording of Quantum.Amsterdam’s online seminar ‘What do

companies get out of quantum projects today?’
What steps should your organisation take? 149

What does an R&D collaboration with academia look like?

Several end-users have started collaborations with universities to better
understand the use cases of quantum computing. This is often a win-win
situation, as companies can learn from renowned experts at relatively low
costs, whereas academics benefit from additional funding and showcasing
that their research has practical interests. Moreover, many countries pro-
vide subsidies for so-called ‘public-private partnerships’. Below, we sketch a
personal experience with the process of starting such a partnership.
You will most likely be dealing with a university’s tech transfer office (TTO),
which specialises in making in-house knowledge available externally. As a
first step, it is important to agree on the scope of the project: what are the
research questions, what are the expected outcomes, how long will the pro-
ject run, and so forth. Ideally, this would be a discussion between an expert
from your organisation and a university’s (assistant) professor. The professor
will most likely take a supervising role, as the actual work is often executed
by a junior researcher employed as a PhD candidate or a postdoctoral (PD)
researcher. PhD programmes take relatively long, 3–5 years depending on
your locale, and it may take some time before the first results come in. Post-
doc projects often take 1–3 years and can lead to results sooner, but as of
2024, it can be much harder to hire a postdoc with the right competencies.
When the topic and duration of the project are clear, it is important to dis-
cuss details around intellectual property (IP), often done by legal experts.
For universities, it is important that researchers can keep building upon the
project’s IP in an academic setting. Moreover, they will demand that the
results can be published in scientific journals. At the same time, a paying
company will want sufficient options to patent new discoveries and will
require exclusive use of the IP within their sector. These demands do not
necessarily conflict with each other, and in principle, it should be possible
to find an arrangement that satisfies both parties.
A straightforward way to ensure that the company learns from the academ-
ic developments is by organising meetings or workshops throughout the col-
laboration project, in which the ongoing R&D is discussed with company staff.
The occasional dialogue with company staff is arguably more important than
a shiny final report or paper, which risks disappearing in someone’s drawer.

12.3 Migrating to post-quantum cryptography

This section relies on technical knowledge from the previous chapter on

cybersecurity.
What steps should your organisation take? 151

Step 2b: Prepare your migration

Cryptography is a completely different beast, with a more concrete goal, and
more urgent timelines for most organisations. Contrary to the applications in
the previous section, the cryptography migration is not optional. Fortunately,
most organisations face the same problem, and there is ample research
on effective steps. The core challenge is to upgrade all existing public key
cryptography to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) in the next decade,
which could be spread over hundreds or thousands of different applications.
Many businesses, especially those dealing with critical infrastructure, may
additionally deal with regulators who may or may not have guidelines ready.
Moreover, IT transitions can be incredibly slow – it is not uncommon to see
plans that cover five or even ten years.1

Authorities seem to agree that the following initial steps should be taken
urgently by all large organisations.
– Create awareness: make sure that the quantum threat is well-understood
in your security departments and among IT managers and product owners
throughout the organisation.
– Create an inventory of cryptographic assets used within the organisation.
This should include both software and hardware and should clearly specify
the used algorithms, whether developed in-house or purchased from a
vendor. Some parties refer to a ‘cryptographic bill of materials’ (CBOM).
– Determine the risk and urgency of PQC migration. Most organisations
already perform regular risk assessments of their IT infrastructure. Ad-
ditionally, organisations should assess whether they classify as an urgent
adopter of PQC (see below).
– Create a migration plan. This is a more
complex step, which should at least priori-
tise which assets must be migrated first and
indicate whether the migration of all urgent
systems can be realistically achieved in
time, before the arrival of cryptographically
relevant quantum computers.

For more details, we recommend following

the PQC Migration Handbook, a free guide
written by the Dutch secret service AIVD and
research organisations CWI and TNO. Security
authorities in other countries have made similar
guidance available.
152  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Are you an urgent adopter?

Planning ahead to transition to new cryptography can be more critical
depending on the organisation. We can distinguish between regular and
urgent adopters. You are an urgent adopter when you:
– Handle sensitive or personal data with a long confidentiality span;
– Handle critical infrastructure on which large groups of people rely;
– Provide systems with a long lifespan; hence, your products will still be
around when quantum computers are available.

Based on these criteria, a significant fraction of organisations would classify

as urgent adopters, such as banks, governments, car manufacturers, grid
operators, hospitals, and so forth. Examples of non-urgent adopters could
be schools, webshops, travel agencies, some construction agencies, etc.
Urgent adopters are encouraged to start their migration as soon as possible
if they haven’t already.

Step 3b: Migrate

This is a much more technical step for which you will need a well-prepared
migration plan from the previous step.
Organisations are strongly discouraged from implementing their own
cryptographic functions. The best practice is to rely on standard libraries
written by cryptographic experts, which should be safe against a broad
spectrum of attacks and have seen careful reviews. We expect NIST’s stand-
ards to soon be available in popular open-source packages like OpenSSL or
BouncyCastle. This makes the migration less technical, although organisa-
tions still deal with the operational challenge of updating a huge number
of applications within a limited time.
Due to harvest now, decrypt later attacks, most organisations will focus on
updating key exchange algorithms before updating digital signature methods.
On the technical side, cryptographic experts recommend the use of hybrid
algorithms that combine the strengths of PQC (to defend against quantum
attacks) with a proven conventional public key algorithm (which guarantees
at least the original security in case the new PQC algorithm turns out to
be less safe than expected). For example, early versions of quantum-safe
connections with the Chrome web browser use a combination of X25519
(elliptic curves) and Kyber-768 (ML-KEM).
Moreover, the practice of cryptographic agility is strongly encouraged,
meaning that security protocols can be easily updated and replaced. This is
a vague term that isn’t just a software feature – it requires alignment with
business protocols and internal policies.
What steps should your organisation take? 153

12.4 Further reading

To learn more about transitioning to quantum-safe cryptography, we

strongly recommend the PQC Migration Handbook written by the Dutch
secret service AIVD and research organisations TNO and CWI.

An extension to the handbook is the PQChoiceAssistant, a tool that recom-

mends what cryptographic algorithms are best used in specific situations.

In 2022, the NSA published requirements for national security systems.

They indicate a timeline with concrete deadlines between 2025 and 2033.

12.5 Note

1. To illustrate, the PQC Migration Handbook mentions that: ‘Judging from previous
migrations this process might take well over five years’. The NSA’s requirements for
national security systems, published in 2022, demand that quantum-safe algorithms
be exclusively used from 2033 onwards. NIST has indicated that quantum-unsafe
standards will be deprecated in 2030 and will be disallowed around 2035.
 Part 4

The final bits

13 Further reading

Below, we give a selection of recommended sources to learn more about

this fascinating topic.

13.1 I want to learn the technical details

For (older) high school students (or those who followed high-school level
mathematics):

Quantum Quest [Book/website] is an intensive five-week online course

about the theory (mathematics) of quantum computing. Materials are
freely available for self-study.

Quantum in Pictures (Cooke) [Book] teaches the theory (mathematics) of

quantum computing using diagrams.

Undergraduate (Bachelor’s) university level:

Quantum.Country [Website] – the ‘Duolingo of Quantum Computing’, a

very well-written introduction for those with a late high-school or early
university-level math background.

Quantum Computation and Quantum Information (Nielsen, Chuang) [Book]

– the ‘bible of quantum computing’. Perhaps not the most up-to-date, but
definitely the most well-known resource in our field. Sets the standards for
jargon and notation.

Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction (Mermin) [Book] – a well-

written introduction, with quite some focus on manipulating quantum
circuits.
158  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

Quantum Computing Since Democritus (Aaronson) [Book] – Aaronson is

an authority in the field. His book touches upon many topics, such as the
foundations of computer science, black holes and consciousness, making
it a good read for those looking for something much broader than just
quantum computing.

Graduate (Master’s) level:

These assume no prior knowledge about quantum physics but require a
strong background in mathematics (i.e. linear algebra, calculus, advanced
inequality bounds and approximations, etc.). In exchange, they go into
much more detail.
Lecture Notes for UvA course ‘Quantum Computing’
by Ronald de Wolf, which is frequently updated
and features some cutting-edge algorithms. Via
the course website, you can find the link and
password to view all the recorded lectures.

Lecture Notes for Caltech course ‘Quantum Computing’ by John Preskil

Scientific overview papers

The papers below are aimed at scientists from fields other than quantum
computing itself. All papers we mention are open-access and peer-reviewed,
making them very suitable for citation.

‘Quantum Algorithms: An Overview’ (Ashley Montanaro)

‘The Potential Impact of Quantum Computers on

Society’ (Ronald de Wolf), also available as recorded
lecture.
Further reading 159

Scientific opinions and discussions

Scott Aaronson’s blog. Although written from a theoretical computer
science perspective, this blog addresses a very broad range of quantum
computing topics. Prof. Aaronson has a strong authority in the field,
and his posts attract readership and comments from a broad range of
prominent scientists.

13.2 I want to learn to program a quantum computer

Several programming packages for quantum computers exist, mostly main-

tained by major hardware providers. All of them offer great introductory
tutorials. The ones we recommend below are all in Python:
Qiskit, the language by IBM, probably features the
largest catalogue of learning materials. To start
from scratch, we recommend following the ‘Basics
of Quantum Information’, which teaches both the
mathematics behind qubits and the usage of the
package itself.

Cirq is a very similar package developed by Google.

As of 2024, they have a more focused tutorial to
explain the programming package itself without
extensive theory of quantum mechanics.

QWorld Bronze offers tutorials in the form of Jupyter notebooks and hosts
various training days around the world, mostly focused on Qiskit and
sometimes ProjectQ.

PennyLane is a package by startup Xanadu with a strong focus on machine

learning applications.

Classiq is one of the largest players that focuses on a higher-level

programming language. This makes it easier to re-use code and to
synthesise circuits for different types of hardware, but it also requires more
background knowledge to get started.
160  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

13.3 I want to stay up to date with the latest developments

Major business conferences

Q2B (organised by QCWare)

IQT (Inside Quantum Technology)

Quantum.Tech (organised by Alpha Events)

Commercialising Quantum (organised by The Economist)

Major scientific conferences

The following are very technical and only recommended for those acquainted
with the field. They take place at a different location each year.

Quantum Information Processing (QIP)

Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography

(TQC)
Further reading 161

Quantum Computing Theory in Practice (QCTIP) (mostly based in the UK)

Business News

Quantum Computing Report - don’t be fooled by the basic look on the

website. The content is written with a very critical eye and with very
relevant contextual information, making it our favourite source for
quantum-related news.

The Quantum Insider

Scientific news
The sources below do not focus exclusively on Quantum Technology, but
offer high-quality scientific news (and surely none would miss any important
quantum breakthroughs).

Quanta Magazine

Phys.org

13.4 I want to learn more about business implications

Several sources cover similar topics as this book. Most of these come from
consultants of hardware providers who have a financial interest in making
162  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

others get started with quantum. In our opinion, the articles are sometimes
too optimistic and predict that quantum applications will come much
sooner than the typical expert would anticipate. On the other hand, they
collect insightful details about financial matters.

McKinsey publishes yearly ‘Quantum Technology Monitor’ reports,

focusing on the economic impact that quantum computers will have.

Cloudflare’s support pages contain an incredibly complete bible of

Post-Quantum Cryptography

Are you looking for a much more extensive source that covers pretty much
everything there is to know about quantum computers? French consultant
Olivier Ezratty regularly updates a 1500+ page book, Understanding
Quantum Technologies.

Workshops and trainings

Short workshops will likely cover content similar to this book. A one-
afternoon training can be particularly useful to inspire your colleagues
and friends.

The Workshop General Awareness Quantum Computing follows the same

philosophy as this book: an introduction to business opportunities that
should be understandable for everyone.

Qureca is a British startup that offers several trainings, such as ‘Quantum

for Everyone’ and ‘Quantum Training for Business’.
14 Overview of quantum computers
available today

This list shows a selection of the larger quantum computers as of August 2024,
based on publicly available sources. The list is not exhaustive, there are many
other systems that are not mentioned here.

Company #Qubits Platform

+ chip name + notes

IBM 1121 Superconducting

“Condor” + Fast
127 + Precise gates
“Eagle” – Limited connectivity
Rigetti 79
“Aspen-M-3”
83
“Ankaa-2”
Google 105
“Sycamore”
University of Science and 66
Technology of China, Hefei
IQM 20
“Garnet”
PsiQuantum 0 Photonic
Quix 20 modes + Fast
University of Science and 100 modes, – Imprecise
Technology of China, Hefei 50 photons, – Different formalism
(equivalent to roughly 90
limited qubits).
IonQ 36 Trapped ions
“Forte” + Connectivity
Quantinuum 32 + Precise
“H1-2” – Slow operations
56
“H2-1”
Alpine Quantum 24
Technologies
Pasqal 100 as computer Cold atoms
196 as simulator + Connectivity
QuEra 280 – Slow operations
D-Wave 5000 D-Wave’s Quantum Anneal-
ers use superconducting
qubits which specialize in a
single algorithm: annealing.
15 Quantum Hype Bingo

‘Our algorithm solves

Straightforwardly
…’
‘Unprecedented ‘Future-proof your solving generic
(without com-
capabilities’ business’ (NP-)hard optimisa-
parison to classical
tion problems
computers)

‘Harness the com- Trying all solutions

‘Game-changing’ ‘Transformative’
mercial potential’ at once

‘X times faster’
Solving climate
‘Unhackable’ ‘The next frontier’ (without fair
change
benchmark)

Quantum computers Enable artificial

Quantum parallelism will replace classical Get quantum-ready general intelligence
computers (AGI)
16 Acknowledgements

Writing this book was a process of multiple years, during which I relied on
the expertise of many others to bring this book to life. Through this section,
I’d like to thank everyone who helped and supported me.
The initial content was born through a blog series I started with Joran van
Apeldoorn. I want to thank him for fruitful brainstorming sessions and for
helping to establish a clear set of messages for a well-defined audience – a
crucial first step in crafting a meaningful story.
I am also indebted to many other friends, colleagues, and peers in the
field of quantum computing who have helped me with advice, feedback,
and insights. I want to thank Dimitri van Esch and Christian Schaffner for
their broad tips and feedback, especially for helping me grasp many subtle
details about cybersecurity. I’m grateful to Leonie Cazemier, Jonas Helsen,
Victor Land, and Mischa Vos for their proofreading and helpful feedback.
Also, many thanks go to Seenivasan Hariharan for extensive feedback
and invaluable guidance on the topic of chemistry and material science.
Moreover, I want to express my appreciation to Craig Gidney and Kareljan
Schoutens for helping me with many broader insights and discussions, and
to many people at QuSoft for insightful exchanges over the past years. Last
but not least, a special thanks to Ronald de Wolf for proofreading the entire
book and for sharply pointing out several mistakes and nuances.
I am grateful for the support of various organisations I work with, includ-
ing the University of Amsterdam, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, QuSoft,
Quantum.Amsterdam, and Quantum Delta NL, which made the publication
of this book possible. Also, thanks to QuTech for allowing me to use the
beautiful pictures of their labs.
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18 Index

accuracy see fidelity fault-tolerance see error correction

adiabatic computing 128 FeMoco 59–61, 86–88
advantage see quantum advantage fidelity 56–57, 135–138
algorithm
definition 33–34 gate see quantum gate
depth 134–141 generative adversarial networks (GANs) 116
for linear systems of equations 43 ground state 81–82, 84
width 134–141 Grover’s algorithm 42, 46, 95
ammonia 59, 86–88
amplitude 17–18, 72, 82 harvest now, decrypt later 96, 99, 106
analogue computing 81, 129 heuristics 46, 49–50, 111–112
artificial intelligence (AI) see optimisation HHL algorithm see algorithm for linear systems
asymmetric keys / cryptography see cryptogra- of equations.
phy, public key high-performance computing 28–29
asymptotic complexity see complexity hype 85–86
authentication 91, 95, 97–98, 106
image classification 117
benchmarking 45, 111–113 integrity 91, 95, 97–98

chemistry 38, 58–61, 81–89 key distribution 90, 96

circuit see quantum circuit key encapsulation 94, 98
classical
computers 27, 31, 43, 49–50, 84, 96, 129, 138 logical qubits 57–58, 133–134, 143
data 19–20, 72 low-density parity check (LPDC)
internet 27, 103 codes 141–143
clustering (application) 121
colour codes 141 machine learning see optimisation
complexity (of a computation) 45, 109–111 material science 38, 46–49, 81–90
complexity classes 45 measurement 18–22, 72–75, 134
computational complexity see complexity measurement-based computing 128
connectivity 56 migration (of IT systems) 39, 151–153
control electronics 25 Moore’s Law 29, 65, 67, 76
correlated systems, (strongly) 82, 115–116
cryptographic agility 40, 99, 152 neural networks 43, 46, 116–118
cryptographic bill of materials (CBOM) 151 NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quan-
cryptography tum) 61–63, 129, 132
hybrid 39, 99, 152 noise 25
post-quantum see post-quantum no-regret moves 145–146
cryptography NP (complexity class) 46, 84, 111
public key 39–40, 93–100, 105, 151
observation see quantum measurement
decoherence 19 optimisation 42–44, 109–123
depth see algorithm depth
dequantisation 44 parallelism see quantum parallelism
digital signatures 91, 94–95, 98 phase estimation see quantum phase
drug design 115–117 estimation
dynamics see time evolution photonic qubits 63, 128, 131–132
physical qubits 56, 61, 134
electricity grids 121 platform (qubit technology) 131–132
electronic structure problem 82 polynomial (speedup) 42, 45–47
entanglement 21–22, 73–76, 82 portfolio optimisation 118–119
error correction 46, 56–67, 129, 133–144 post-quantum cryptography (PQC) 39–40,
exponential (speedup) 43–50, 62, 71, 82 93–97, 151–153
174  Introduc tion to Quantum Computing for Business

prime factorization 38–39 search see Grover’s algorithm

probability see quantum measurement Shor’s algorithm 39–40, 46, 58–59
proof of concept 145–147 signatures see digital signatures
public key cryptography see cryptography, simulation (of nature) 38, 49, 81–84
public key simulator see quantum simulator
speed of light 21, 73–75
QAOA (Quantum Approximate Optimisation speedup 31, 37, 42–50, 113–114
Algorithm) 43, 119 state 16–22, 71–75
quadratic (speedup) 42, 45, 49 superconducting qubits 22–26, 131–132, 141, 163
quantum superposition 16–22, 71–72, 82
advantage 48 supremacy see quantum supremacy
algorithm zoo 37 surface codes 58–59, 141–143
annealer 60, 129–132 symmetric keys / cryptography 39, 93–97
gate 19–22, 57–57, 64, 128
key distribution (QKD) 40, 105–107 teleportation 75
networks 40, 103–107 time evolution 81–84
parallelism 72 topological data analysis 43, 49
phase estimation 84 trapped ions 64, 131–132, 163
physics 15–17, 81–82 Trotter-Suzuki method 83–84
random number generator 99–100
sensors 28, 104 ultracold atoms 131–132, 163
simulators 28, 129–132 universal computers 127–132
supremacy 48 utility see quantum utility
technology 27–28
utility 47–49, 61–63 variational quantum circuits 43, 84, 116–119
variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) 43, 84
random numbers 40, 99–100
road map 63–64, 146 width see algorithm width
 koen groenland

koen groenland INTRODUCTION TO QUANTUM COMPUTING FOR BUSINESS

H ow will businesses use quantum technology in the future?

INTRODUCTION TO
What problems will a quantum computer solve? How long
will it take before these devices become commercially relevant?

With the first generation of quantum computers on the horizon,

understanding their impact is more relevant than ever. Luckily,
you don’t need a physics degree to understand the functionality
of these computers – just like you don’t need to know how a
QUANTUM COMPUTING
FOR BUSINESS
transistor works to excel in conventional it.

This book is the perfect introduction to the opportunities and threats

of quantum technologies. It equips you with the necessary knowledge
to join cutting-edge discussions and make strategic decisions.

koen groenland is a theoretical physicist with a PhD in the

near-term applications of quantum computers. He works as an
innovation officer at the University of Amsterdam, where he is
responsible for setting up research collaborations and developing
lifelong learning education for professionals. He is one of the
driving forces behind Quantum. Amsterdam, the innovation hub
that drives the commer­cialisation of quantum technologies
around the Dutch capital.

“Easy to read and full of insights, a must-read for anyone looking

to understand the real-world impact of quantum computing.”
– Diederick Croese, Director of Center for Quantum and Society

“This book offers a well-rounded, scientifically accurate overview

of quantum technology, highlighting its significant potential for
innovation.” – Christian Schaffner, Professor in Theoretical Computer
Science, Director of QuSoft
  

         

Introduction to Quantum Computing for Business.indd 1 11-02-2025 12:05