♪ music playing ♪ >> NARRATOR: Electricity, the steam engine, the automobile, the computer, the internet, these are a few of the innovations that shifted entire civilizations.

Now we are entering a new era, a race that promises to revolutionize our world with incredible new advancements.

Welcome to Quantum State.

♪ music playing ♪ >> KRISTEN: I think quantum computing and quantum technologies in general are an opportunity for us to advance the capabilities that we have as a species and push the information age forward.

>> JUN: Those are technologies that we use to revolutionize our society, how we deliver medicine, how do we monitor people's health, how do we monitor the health of the earth.

>> NARRATOR: We are staring at some of the foundational pieces of science.

>> TONY: Quantum State, it conjures up images we've seen in the movies and TV.

But this is not science fiction.

It is reality.

And it is happening now, right here in Colorado.

>> DAN: Quantum is how the universe really works.

It is how particles really interact with one another.

It is not intuitive to humankind, but it will be, your kids or grandkids when they get to kindergarten, they're going to start learning about quantum early on.

It is our ability to master the true physics of the world and create that into useful services and products that will make the world a better place.

>> NARRATOR: Quantum is a new kind of computing or sensing science at the subatomic level, much the same way nature works.

>> Yeah, so these two are two master lasers.

>> NARRATOR: Scientists have been working to harness it for several decades.

But now, we are entering the second quantum revolution, where science begins using what it learned to create.

>> MEENAKSHI: So the first quantum revolution was when people figured out what quantum is.

That has led to the information technology revolution, that has led to computers, that has led to MRI scans, that has basically changed our world as we know it.

Now the second quantum revolution that everybody is talking about is based on entanglement, where we do not just kind of know that quantum is there and use it, but we are able to actively manipulate it.

>> KRISTEN: Quantum technologies are an exciting junction where they are moving out of the University laboratory, into the engineering workshop, and in the industry.

>> NARRATOR: Imagine eradicating diseases quickly after they appear, reversing climate change, long-lasting batteries for self-driving vehicles, the ability to predict earthquakes and create superconductive materials for space travel.

Even teleportation.

♪ music playing ♪ While Apple is coining the term "think different," these quantum systems really do.

>> LINCOLN: So the first piece is this kind of what we call quantum information, where instead of ones and zeros, you have things between one and zero, or ones and zeros are like black-and-white, true and false, gay and straight, you know whatever analogy you want to use.

So in between those extremes, you can think about this sitting on a sphere of possibilities.

It's what we call the quantum bit, or Qubit.

>> NARRATOR: For example, to solve this maze, today's classical computer will explore a single path at a time to find a solution.

The quantum computer however, will try all paths simultaneously to arrive at the answer.

Making it exponentially more powerful.

>> TONY: Quantum computing has a way of being able to check all of these outcomes at the same exact time.

And by checking all of those outcomes at the same exact time, it can open up a computational space that you would otherwise never have been able to.

>> NARRATOR: At groundbreaking labs and industries along Colorado's front range, experts are perfecting different ways of reaching Quantum State, through lasers or cooling to below deep space temperatures.

>> KRISTEN: And just to emphasize how cold we are really getting, this system right here has our sample below 10 billion Kelvin.

Which is significantly colder than outer space.

And so that is just an incredible engineering feat, where we as engineers, scientists, and physicists can beat nature and get it colder than something even like outer space.

>> NARRATOR: To reach Quantum State, experts agree there are two mysterious forces at work.

The first is superposition, the reality that something can and does exist in two states at once.

In 1935, Dr. Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought experiment examined this paradox by placing a hypothetical cat in a box along with a device that may or may not kill the cat.

Then he asked, is the cat dead or alive?

At this point in the experiment, it's both.

>> PATTY: I think Schrödinger illustrated it very well with his thought experiment with his cat.

Quantum mechanically, his cat can be both dead and alive at the same time.

And until you look at it, you wouldn't know if it happens.

>> JUN: In quantum physics we deal with this concept of superposition.

Where two different states can exist simultaneously.

>> DAN: So superposition is another fundamental property that with engineering we can harness and build into real devices that do things that you can't do in the conventional world.

>> NARRATOR: The second mysterious force is entanglement.

>> TONY: Then there is this idea of entanglement, so you can have two of these quantum bits and you can put them together even if you move them separate in physical distance, separate in time, they maintain information about each other.

>> PATTY: Basically you can entangle two particles and move them to distant locations and because of that entanglement, they can actually know about what's happening to each other.

So I can do something with one of the, you know particles, on one end of the universe, and the other particle will somehow know about it.

>> JUN: Quantum entanglement is very fragile, and in fact quantum computers relies on quantum entanglement.

It relies on these particles that can have a joint operation.

But it is very easily destroyed.

>> LINCOLN: Now Schrödinger said entanglement is the essence of quantum mechanics and I'm paraphrasing.

So you probably know what your partner or children are doing right now.

You have a kind of sense of where they are, what they are doing.

And that is because you are not disconnected.

We call that mutual information.

So something in your thoughts is connected to something in their thoughts, and it seems sort of spiritual, mysterious, or magical, or whatever word you'd like to use for it.

But actually it is very practical, and it's something we can quantify mathematically.

You know, twins are kind of in sync, one sort of knows what the others are doing, and that is a classical mutual information.

So imagine a quantum computer does that but much more.

>> JARED: What quantum computing can bring, is just exponential steps forward in processing speed.

It is the way that we think, we do not think in a binary way, in effect our brains are quantum.

What it does mean it is a step towards that kind of more creative free thinking as opposed to just zeros and ones.

>> NARRATOR: As we explore how our lives will be touched by quantum in the next few years, there is a surprising confluence of new industries and some of the world's top scientists coming together.

>> There are decades of building up in Colorado around us.

So we have the Aspen Center for Physics, we have National Institute of Standards and Technology, we have the National Renewable Energy Lab, we have Mines, Colorado State, we have CU Boulder.

>> DAN: So Colorado has a deep history in quantum.

There has been a lot of the most important discoveries of quantum that happened right here in our backyard.

Through a combination of the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST, working with the University of Colorado and a joint venture called JILA has been intersectional too.

♪ music playing ♪ >> JUN: My students and I built the world's most precise atomic clocks right here in Boulder, Colorado.

50 some plus years of existence have trained generations of the leading scientists, now working in the industry, the national labs, the University, and academia, Colorado and physics in that area alone.

We have four Nobel prize winners in quantum science.

>> ANA MARIA: We are pushing the frontier of science, but the way we do science and the way that science is a collaborative way.

>> TONY: Instead of Silicon Valley, you have the quantum front range and this could be one of the forefront to places not just in the country, but in the world for where quantum computing is done.

♪ music playing ♪ >> KRISTEN: Quantum covers a broad range of technologies that we think can affect people's everyday lives, these are things that range from sensors, that improve the picture that we see and that our aircrafts, and ships, and other platforms see the world around them.

Communications that enable our platforms to talk to each other and talk to the ground, and computation that lets us solve problems we never could solve before.

♪ music playing ♪ >> NARRATOR: Is it possible we may be able to eradicate genetic disorders?

Or even stop the spread of a devastating virus?

>> TONY: One of the ones that just gives me kicks is how we actually develop life-saving drugs today.

I mean we just went through a pandemic, we understand how critical it was for us to be able to get the vaccine out.

And one of the things that we aspire to was quantum computing is you will be able to model and simulate these molecules before you ever build them.

Now think about designing life-saving drugs that not only affect humanity, but can affect individual people because they are tailored to that person's need.

>> NARRATOR: At Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colorado, lives one of the world's largest clinical bio banks.

A single drop of your blood can be taken and broken down into a massive molecular database called a genome sequence on a chip.

>> So every chip that I have scanned should have all of that information.

>> NARRATOR: A quantum computer then takes your millions of unique data points and compares them to every other available sequence on the planet to arrive at health probabilities far more accurate than general medicine can provide today.

>> KATHLEEN: So 20 years from now, every single patient who walks through the door will have their genome sequenced and physicians will be much better armed to mitigate the onset of disease.

We collect and consider as much information and data about each individual patient as possible, to make an individualized decision about that patient.

So what's your risk of developing a certain disease?

How are you going to respond to a medication that I'm getting ready to prescribe to you?

To do all of this, we need big data.

What is exciting about quantum computing is that it is moving that space forward at an unprecedented rate.

♪ music playing ♪ >> NARRATOR: Imagine long-term weather forecasting that would allow you to plan a perfect ski trip weeks in advance.

Or, avoid dangerous storms.

>> ALEX: This is the heart of the quantum computer we are building, this is called the quantum processing unit QPU, similar to the CPU central processing into your computer.

>> NARRATOR: Cold Quanta in Boulder, Colorado is designing and building ultra cool laser-based systems that may someday soon power a broad spectrum of new advancements.

>> DAN: When you make atoms very very very cold, they can pick up signals that they otherwise can't pick up.

And those signals can be used for things like discovering mineral deposits that are very deep in the earth.

Or be able to sense weather patterns or sense natural disasters such as earthquakes.

>> NARRATOR: Once invisibles forces, will soon become visible.

>> JUN: Imagine I'm really worried about Yellowstone that there is a volcano building up underneath and it's going to explode.

We would love to have clock networks around us, and being able to actually see how the mass is moving under the ground.

To use this to see how the sea level is changing, to see where the ice caps are melting, and so on.

And because time, space, and gravity, are all one intricate same physical quantity, building the best atomic clock based on quantum technology allows us to monitor the environment that we live in.

>> NARRATOR: Giants like Intel, IBM, and Google have been locked in the global arms race of sorts to claim quantum supremacy.

>> LINCOLN: I am using Google's quantum computer, you know which has outcomputed all computers on earth as of I believe October 2019.

>> DAN: What you are going to see at Cold Quanta is a computer that promises to be just as powerful or more so, but you're going to see it in its first version on a big tabletop.

And you're going to walk in there and you're not going to be cold, because it operates at room temperature.

>> NARRATOR: Then along came Honeywell.

>> We very intentionally did this as secretly as we could to build up this capability so that by the time we could show the world that we were in quantum computing, we can show the world that we are also the best at quantum computing.

♪ music playing ♪ >> TONY: How do we truly pay attention to everything, how do we take into account the dynamics that are going on in the weather to figure out how we reroute aircraft, we reroute aircraft today.

We do that incredibly suboptimally.

In a position where you are starting to have access to all of that data, but also you have a processing power to say this is the right answer now, it's a pretty powerful moment.

>> NARRATOR: At Lockheed Martin, communications and logistics are top priorities.

>> KRISTEN: You may have two aircraft that communicate with each other, you may have an aircraft communicating with the base station, who is communicating with a soldier in the field, who is communicating with a satellite that allows them to access information about where our various platforms are, where they can get help, what information can be passed to them about their situation that might make the difference to them and give them the tactical advantage.

We want this information to be secure, we want it to be thorough, so we want things that are covert secure communications, but with high bandwidth that will allow us to send more information and give more advantage to our people in the field.

>> NARRATOR: It sounds incredible, yet as Einstein predicted, nature itself has been functioning on the quantum level since the beginning of time.

How?

Just ask the humpback whales off the California coast.

>> DAN: How do whales know how to get from Alaska to Mexico?

How do they navigate?

What is happening inside of that whale that allows them to know how to traverse that adventure?

It's got to be some sort of quantum sensing, the same kind of sensing we are beginning to build, where at the subatomic level, they can sense the environment in ways that they can navigate a real complex environment presumably without even thinking about it the same way that perhaps humans think.

>> NARRATOR: In theory, we could rely on whale navigation to get us to our destination.

>> In order to make autonomous driving truly autonomous, is quantum sensing.

The vehicle is able to know exactly where it is, exactly how fast it's going, without needing to be in communication with GPS systems.

>> NARRATOR: And from the streets, quantum will also take us to the stars.

>> DAN: Quantum sensors include gravity measurement devices, and these gravimeters are key to deep space navigation.

Spacecraft is able to keep track of exactly where it is, as it goes deeper into space, and be able to stay in some level of communication back here without getting lost in space.

♪ music playing ♪ >> NARRATOR: And what about what is in your wallet?

While global leaders know that quantum may help solve some of our world's most complex problems, at home you will be able to more accurately model your savings portfolio to plan for retirement.

>> TONY: If you think about it, what are the big financial services companies going to do?

They are thinking about problems like fraud detection, think about cybersecurity, protecting your financial resources, you know your pensions, your NASDAQ, these are things that you want them to care about.

You want them to be forward-looking to be able to say how do we use quantum computing to help protect?

>> JEREMIE: We have seen all the threats, we have seen every single person has received a notice of their something has been compromised.

>> KRISTEN: What will happen?

Well our whole secure Internet banking infrastructure can come crumbling down if quantum computers cracks the factoring problem.

Well the answer is no, the answer is we just have to make better encryption and solve our problems in more advanced ways.

>> TONY: There are going to be those companies that look and say, is this a predictive tool that we can help understand how the financial markets work better and therefore use that in that way.

>> NARRATOR: Quantum will be felt on Wall Street.

But can it tip the scales in our favor in Vegas?

>> JUN: You can actually argue that quantum betting will be more fair, because you could not really try to look at the Qubit without destroying the other Qu Bit.

So soon as you're looking into the quantum betting, people will find out that this guy is cheating.

>> LINCOLN: Quantum mechanics is all about probability.

So, you might be able to determine what the relative probabilities are for you winning or losing, but I think we all know that you mostly lose.

>> NARRATOR: While predicting the winner of a horse race may not be in the cards, the odds are in favor of uncovering sustainable solutions for energy, food, freshwater, and the very health of our planet.

♪ music playing ♪ >> PATTY: My dream is that we can actually make something that is going to benefit society.

You know that's going to solve these big problems that we have today, like climate change.

>> NARRATOR: Imagine creating materials that actually absorb carbon pollution and turn it into energy.

Just like your ordinary houseplant.

>> LINCOLN: So by 2040, all energy on earth will be used for computers if we don't change how we are doing computing.

It is actually the most finite resource we have.

It's more finite than clean water, it's more finite than petroleum, and we are absolutely running out.

The great news is that unlike with clean water and petroleum, where the solutions are much more complicated, with computing we have pretty good solutions and one of them is quantum computing.

Can we do what plants do naturally, and can earth, can sunlight cheaply and easily and cleanly, no mining, none of that stuff, and yeah we think we can.

We need to understand the quantum part of photosynthesis.

>> NARRATOR: The next time you look at your friendly little ficus, remember it has a PhD in quantum.

It likely knows the key to help us solve dozens of challenges we face today that only quantum computing can solve.

>> TONY: How do we get food that is in abundance in some of these places where we have it, be able to transport it in the right ways to the right location so that it can get redistributed out to places that need it.

And again those sound like simple problems, but they are not.

Even as sophisticated as our supercomputers are today, we actually can't solve that problem.

>> LINCOLN: We're solving a problem that's nitrogen fixation, which is how you make artificial fertilizer.

So right now we actually need petroleum as a component of our fertilizer.

So we can't stop extracting petroleum from the earth, or we will actually starve.

These are very very serious problems and a lot of times people don't know sort of how interconnected they are.

Like clean water, clean energy, all these things, it's not like you just put in some solar cells and you're done.

>> NARRATOR: Experts predict that we will soon reach a new understanding of our universe that will launch an unprecedented revolution of life-changing advancements.

And while there are challenging problems to solve, many of us are hoping that one of the breakthroughs might be teleportation.

>> KRISTEN: Quantum teleportation is something very different than you think of as Beam me up, Scottie!, right?

One of the rules of quantum mechanics that is very different from the rules of classical information and it's the no cloning theory.

So that means you can't make an exact copy of a quantum state without destroying the original.

So if you have one Qubit, and you want to make another Qubit that is exactly the same, they like to call the process teleportation because it destroys the original so it is like it moved.

>> NARRATOR: And time travel?

>> JUN: Time travel I'm not sure of.

I think that in principle you can't really arrive at causality.

But you can go through wormholes, that certainly is a concept that is scientifically still sound.

Maybe you can come out after that, could it be that the entire universe is entangled?

>> LINCOLN: You know it is hard to say what fun things will come out, and I'm sure that's what the public would like to know.

What we are actually doing is solving hard science problems.

>> NARRATOR: Quantum is a new frontier, and with it comes risks and questions of ethics that some fear.

>> JUN: If you build a machine that is smarter than humans, are you worried about that?

>> KRISTEN: With more advanced capabilities that quantum technology brings, we can counteract whatever negative potential there may be.

>> JEREMIE: Every technology brings ethics questions.

So there will be negatives, but as long as there are more positives, there are more people interested working on the positives, it is going to lead to you know positive outcomes.

>> TONY: Our mission is to positively change the world through the application of quantum computing.

And that positive, that's a big deal.

This is a tool.

We have created a technology that is a super powerful tool, and tools as we have seen in the past can be used for great purposes, and sometimes they can be used for not good purposes.

Our job is to make sure that they are only being used for the things that are going to help humanity.

♪ music playing ♪ >> NARRATOR: Probability makes one thing abundantly clear.

Colorado and its quantum front range, make for the ideal quantum state.

>> MEENAKSHI: There are a lot of challenges in bringing quantum to people's homes.

To solve invasive problems that we do not yet know the answer for, and for that the workforce is necessary.

A workforce that will work at universities, but also in the industry.

>> TONY: The talent that existed in Colorado is outstanding.

And part of the reason that talent exists in Colorado to do what we are doing is because of the education institutions that are here.

>> LINCOLN: We need quantum engineering education programs across the United States, and actually Mines, CU Boulder have two of the first in the country another reason why Colorado is a real center for this.

>> JARED: Colorado is really situated to make the quantum front range the epicenter of the global quantum computing industry.

And so what is now a number of early-stage research start ups, some work in our great universities like the University of Colorado will soon become a major source of jobs and power the next generation of consumer products across the world.

>> TONY: When you give really smart people tools like this, they get to be very clever.

People are making predictions, oh this is going to be 10 years, 15 years, even from right now till something is useful, we are starting to see evidence that we could be two or three years away from something that would be utilized for true value creation.

>> DAN: Well I believe quantum is as big of a deal as the Internet has been.

So think about the Internet over the last 30 years, that is what quantum is going to be over the next 30 years.

When people start to put quantum to work, and quantum computing, quantum sensing, what will come of that?

We have ideas, but whatever ideas we have now are just scratching the surface of what's going to happen.

>>TONY: I think if we look back on this in 30 years, we are going to be shocked at how little we thought this could do.

Shocked.

>> JEREMIE: I would say quantum is the reason I am hopeful about the future.

There's hope that once we can use that technology we can do things at scale and efficiently like we've never been able to do, and we can start to heal some of those wounds that we have caused.

>> KRISTEN: All in the air around me, information packets are flying over electromagnetic waves, they are bringing data to things like the smartphones that we use all the time, if somebody had a computer, or if you had a [indiscernible 25:56], what are you going to do, you pick up your smart phone and look for a picture of a cat on the Internet.

But they are very cute.

Maybe a quantum computer can make them even cuter.

This is super advanced technology that has become so ubiquitous, and so useful, and so easy to access that it's boring.

When quantum information science is boring too, we'll know we have arrived.

♪ music playing ♪