Making Quantum Technology Ready for Industry

The Quantum Technologies Flagship, officially launched on 29 October 2018 in Vienna, is a EUR 1 billion initiative, supported by the European Commission and Member States, funding over 5,000 of Europe's leading Quantum Technologies researchers over the next ten years and aiming at placing Europe at the forefront of the second quantum revolution. Its long-term vision is to develop a quantum web, where quantum computers, simulators and sensors are interconnected via quantum communication networks. This will help kick-starting a competitive European quantum industry transforming research results into commercial applications and disruptive technologies. The Joint Research Center (JRC) in cooperation with the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC), European Commission’s Directorate General Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CNECT), and the German Institute of Standardisation (DIN), organised in Brussels on 28-29 March 2019 the Putting-Science-Into-Standards (PSIS) workshop on Quantum Technologies. The PSIS workshops is an initiative that brings together researchers, industry and standardisers with the purpose of facilitating the identification and screening of emerging science and technology areas that can be introduced early into the process of standardisation to enable innovation. The experience with the innovation impact pathway of the Graphene Flagship that combined technology push and market pull by working with industry stakeholders was used to demonstrate the benefit of a strategic use of standardisation to increase technology readiness levels and reach the market. The participants of the workshop identified aspects that would benefit from standardisation activities in three main areas: (i) Quantum Key Distribution and quantum-safe security, (ii) Quantum metrology, sensing and imaging, (iii) and Quantum computing and internet. Several existing standardisation activities focussing on quantum enabled security techniques, quantum computing and communication were also mapped. With the direct involvement of the participants, the workshop prepared the ground towards a roadmap of additional pressing technology fields where standardisation could add value to the deployment of Quantum Technologies in industrial applications, including security, sensing, imaging and measurement. An active dialogue between the communities of researchers and standardisers as well as a continuous interchange with the Quantum Technologies Flagship would be beneficial for future interactions and cooperation. The Standards, Innovation and Research Platform (STAIR / CEN and CENELEC) methodology could constitute a straightforward approach to host interactions between the communities of researchers and standardisers. Next steps would be to start an interaction (e.g. a cooperation agreement) with the Quantum Flagship and in particular with the recently (April 2019) launched Coordination and Support Action of the Quantum Flagship. As concrete actions for standardisation, the workshop suggested to focus on the standardisation of a quantum technology terminology and on the development of an EU standardisation roadmap for Quantum Technologies. These could be addressed by a European Committee for Standardization workshop or by a focus group.JRC.A.5-Scientific Developmen

Epistemic policy networks in the European Union’s CBRN risk mitigation policy

This paper offers insights into an innovative and currently flagship approach of the European Union (EU) to the mitigation of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) risks. Building on its long-time experience in the CBRN field, the EU has incorporated methods familiar to the students of international security governance: it is establishing regional networks of experts and expertise. CBRN Centers of Excellence, as they are officially called, aim to contribute to the security and safety culture in different parts of Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia, and South East Europe, in the broadly construed CBRN area. These regional networks represent a modern form of security cooperation, which can be conceptualized as an epistemic policy networks approach. It offers flexibility to the participating states, which have different incentives to get involved. At the same, however, the paper identifies potential limitations and challenges of epistemic policy networks in this form

FGQT Q04 - Standardization Roadmap on Quantum Technologies [written by the CEN-CENELEC Focus Group on Quantum Technologies (FGQT)]

In 2018, the European Commission launched its long term and large scale Quantum Technology FET Flagship Program. The European Commission is also very interested in boosting standards for quantum technologies (QT). The Quantum Flagship has its own cooperation and coordination activities to “coordinate national strategies and activities” and in its “Quantum Manifesto” [1] explicitly advises to form “advisory boards” to promote collaboration in standardization. The CEN/CENELEC Focus Group for Quantum Technologies (FGQT) was formed in June 2020 with the goal to support the plans of the Commission. Currently, a multitude of standardization activities in QT are ongoing worldwide. While there is overlap in certain areas, other areas of this wide technological field are not being addressed at all. A coordinated approach will be highly beneficial to unleash the full potential of standardization for speeding up progress—also because the pool of standardization experts available for quantum technologies is still very limited. Furthermore, not all areas are yet “ready for standardization”, i.e., while in some fields early standardization is capable of boosting progress, it may be a problem in other areas. Thus, an assessment of standardization readiness of the different areas is required, too. The FGQT was established to identify standardization needs and opportunities for the entire field of QT with the final goal to boost the establishment of new industries in Europe and consequently the development and engineering of unprecedented novel devices and infrastructures for the benefit of European citizens. The QT standardization roadmap follows a constructive approach, starting with basic enabling technologies, from which QT components and subsystems are constructed, which again are assembled into QT systems that in turn form composite systems, constituting the building blocks for use cases. Thus, the roadmap is structured approximating very closely the categories of the EC quantum technology FET Flagship Program: quantum communication, quantum computing and simulation, quantum metrology, sensing, and enhanced imaging, while the basic enabling technologies and sub-systems are organized in two pools —thus supporting re-use in the different system categories. The separate types of QT unit systems are then foundations of general QT infrastructures or composite systems. On the level of use cases, the QT standardization roadmap describes basic domains of applicability, so-called “meta use cases”, while the detailed use cases are listed in a separate document of the FGQT: “FGQT Q05 Use Cases”. Finally, the QT standardization roadmap presents an outlook and conclusions, including an actual prioritization of the single identified standardization needs in the form of sequence diagrams (Gantt charts). This approach differs slightly from the QT “Pillar design” of the EU Quantum Flagship but, in our opinion, it extends it and is better adapted to standardization purposes, while the former is optimally suited as a research program design. The FGQT is an open group of European-based experts, working in QT research areas or enabling technologies, and of developers of components, products, or services related to QT. If you are based in Europe, and interested in guidelines and standards to help setting up a research infrastructure, or structuring and boosting your market relevance; if you want to improve coordination with your stakeholders and are interested in coordination and exchange with other experts in the field of QT—please consider to join the CEN/CENELEC FGQT. NOTE 1 European QT standards development in CEN/CENELEC will take place in the new JTC 22 QT (Joint Technical Committee 22 on Quantum Technologies). The work in JTC 22 QT will be guided by the present roadmap doc ument, and it is expected that the FGQT roadmap-development activity will be absorbed/continued by JTC 22 Q

Engage D3.10 Research and innovation insights

Engage is the SESAR 2020 Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN). It is managed by a consortium of academia and industry, with the support of the SESAR Joint Undertaking. This report highlights future research opportunities for ATM. The basic framework is structured around three research pillars. Each research pillar has a dedicated section in this report. SESAR’s Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda, Digital European Sky is a focal point of comparison. Much of the work is underpinned by the building and successful launch of the Engage wiki, which comprises an interactive research map, an ATM concepts roadmap and a research repository. Extensive lessons learned are presented. Detailed proposals for future research, plus research enablers and platforms are suggested for SESAR 3

Large tunable valley splitting in edge-free graphene quantum dots on boron nitride

Coherent manipulation of binary degrees of freedom is at the heart of modern quantum technologies. Graphene offers two binary degrees: the electron spin and the valley. Efficient spin control has been demonstrated in many solid state systems, while exploitation of the valley has only recently been started, yet without control on the single electron level. Here, we show that van-der Waals stacking of graphene onto hexagonal boron nitride offers a natural platform for valley control. We use a graphene quantum dot induced by the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope and demonstrate valley splitting that is tunable from -5 to +10 meV (including valley inversion) by sub-10-nm displacements of the quantum dot position. This boosts the range of controlled valley splitting by about one order of magnitude. The tunable inversion of spin and valley states should enable coherent superposition of these degrees of freedom as a first step towards graphene-based qubits

'Grow your own': Cold War intelligence and history supermarkets

Most of the records of the three British secret services relating to the Cold War remain closed. Nevertheless, the Open Government initiative in the UK and the Clinton Executive Order of 1995 have resulted in some disclosures, often from consumer agencies who were in receipt of intelligence material. There have also been limited releases from other countries. Against that background, this essay considers two questions: First, how far has the study of intelligence affected the broad context of Cold War history during the last decade? And second, how effective have we been in probing the institutional history of secret services during the Cold War? The essay concludes that while some secret services are breaking new ground by recording their own oral history, academic historians have been less than enterprising in their investigations and tend towards a culture of archival dependency

Developing Next-generation Brain Sensing Technologies - A Review.

Advances in sensing technology raise the possibility of creating neural interfaces that can more effectively restore or repair neural function and reveal fundamental properties of neural information processing. To realize the potential of these bioelectronic devices, it is necessary to understand the capabilities of emerging technologies and identify the best strategies to translate these technologies into products and therapies that will improve the lives of patients with neurological and other disorders. Here we discuss emerging technologies for sensing brain activity, anticipated challenges for translation, and perspectives for how to best transition these technologies from academic research labs to useful products for neuroscience researchers and human patients