Canada’s National QC Program Seeks Public Input on Strategy

The US Office of Science and Technology Policy recently released its second annual National Quantum Initiative (NQI) report, a supplement to the President's FY22 Budget Request that outlines the major US government quantum information science (QIS) research activities and related funding levels out to FY 2022. As seen in Figure 1, the proposed FY2022 budget, which is targeted for about $880 million, calls for an increase of nearly 11% from the previous year. Roughly half of the funding is to come from the NQI and the other half from base agency-specific QIS R&D budgets. The figure represents the sum of Federal budgets for U.S. QIS R&D efforts in over a dozen agencies including NIST, NSF, DOE, NASA, DOD, and DHS, and it also aggregates several QIS subtopics such as computing, networking, sensing, fundamental science, and end quantum-related use cases

The US government recently stood up a consortium of six Washington D.C.-based federal agencies to explore a range of quantum technologies necessary to create, demonstrate, and operate DC-QNet, a regional, multi-kilometer quantum network testbed. The six participating agencies span a range of US government mission agencies including the National Security Agency, the US Naval Research Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The program targets key underlying technologies needed to implement a metro[1]area quantum network that includes high-fidelity quantum memory, single photon devices, and related network metrology as well as mechanisms to support quantum entanglement between network nodes in a quantum computer. Details about project schedule and budget have not yet been made available, but each participating agency will be responsible for funding its research activities.