UK’s key quantum advocate at Pembroke for Cambridge Tech Week debate and talk
Sir Peter Knight, a British physicist, professor of quantum optics and senior research investigator at Imperial College London, is one of the speakers at Cambridge Tech Week 2024, which begins on 9 September.
Sir Peter chairs the UK Quantum Technology Strategic Advisory Board and will be at Pembroke College for the 11 September event titled ‘Deep Dive: The Practical Applications of Quantum Technologies’.
The occasion will be one of the highlights of Cambridge Tech Week, which is previewed here.
A Q&A with Sir Peter established that he is a regular visitor to Cambridge.
“Yes,” he says. “I served on the Winton Board for Sustainability with Richard Friend for several years until quite recently and advise a number of Cambridge-based quantum start-ups and SMEs. I have many colleagues in the Cambridge area. And personally, Addenbrooke’s have been great in helping me preserve my eyesight after a retinal tear!
What will you be talking about at Cambridge Tech Week?
I have been the UK’s quantum technology programme champion for the past 10 years or more and one of the architects of our national programme.
I was planning to kick off with a state-of-the-world re quantum and the UK’s position, where we have just completed a £1bn 10-year investment in creating the National Quantum Technology Programme, bringing together researchers and industry and working to deliver the £2.5bn vision for the next decade which was set out in last year’s UK National Quantum Strategy
Recently Riverlane announced it is on course to achieve one million error-free quantum computations by 2028. Will that be a big moment ?
Absolutely: the Riverlane road-map to deliver a fault-tolerant quantum machine at scale is an example of the necessary steps we need.
But there’s lots more in Cambridge: major research strengths in our national programme in physics and in engineering, the UK end of Quantinuum- a very large quantum hardware and software company, and the excellent Nu-Quantum spin out from the Cavendish in the area of quantum networking, and finally the major Toshiba enterprise at the Cambridge Science Park led by Andrew Shields.
Do you worry about quantum-powered AI – in terms of power usage, or that quantum’s ability to crack encryption damage online security?
I am not an expert on AI - but there, large language models will indeed consume vast amounts of electricity, whereas quantum computing may not. So power consumption for QC is not one of my worries.
However, we do know that a large-scale quantum computer will render all our current crypto primitives vulnerable, undermining the security of the internet and this may well happen in a decade, which is why we need quantum safe crypt: that I do worry about. But we do already know how to protect internet banking using post-quantum and quantum techniques!
- Full schedule for Cambridge Tech Week, 9-13 September, here.
