One hundred years after the publication of the foundational works of quantum mechanics, we are witnessing the dawn of quantum industries.
In 1925, an averaged size town in the middle of Germany called Göttingen became the centre of modern physics; working at the local university, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and Pascual Jordan1,2,3 developed the foundational works of quantum mechanics. At the time, a new theoretical framework had become necessary to explain numerous experimental findings of the preceding decades such as the double slit experiment, which could not be explained using classical laws. Heisenberg developed a first formalism to describe quantum phenomena in a consistent manner based on observable parameters and making use of non-commutative operators1. Born and Jordan, together with Heisenberg, then translated this framework to a more general matrix representation2,3. Also in 1925, the Austrian Erwin Schrödinger, at the time affiliated with the University of Zürich, postulated an alternative approach to self-consistently describe a quantum mechanical object by means of its wave function using partial differential equations, the formalism published in 19264. These works laid the foundation for the theoretical investigation of the quantum world and later became the basis for what is now known as the first quantum revolution — a great many twentieth-century technologies such as transistors, solar cells, lasers, or magnetic tunnel junctions are based on quantum mechanical phenomena, such as tunnelling.
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One hundred years later, we are experiencing the second quantum revolution with a rise of technologies that make explicit use of two cornerstone characteristics of quantum mechanics: coherence, the stable, predictable evolution of a quantum state; and entanglement, the strange interconnection of quantum objects that cannot be described independently, even if separated over large distances. Coherence and entanglement are the main resource in quantum technologies such as quantum communication, quantum sensing, or quantum computation. These technologies promise secure communication, increased sensitivity, and solutions to problems unsolvable with conventional computation, respectively. The significance of this revolution is reflected by the fact that the UNESCO has declared 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ). The IYQ is raising awareness of the growing global impact quantum technology has on industries and will have on societies.
Some recent examples of the push from fundamental research towards real world applications can be found in a Collection featuring research articles and reviews from the Nature Portfolio. The fact that contributions come from both traditional research labs and universities as well as from quantum start-ups and big tech is an indicator that the era of quantum industries is approaching.
In a Technology Feature in the current issue, Edwin Cartlidge discusses how quantum communication may become a major factor in finance industries for secure communication and how banks prepare. In the long term, the finance industry hopes for quantum computation to help with risk management or derivatives modelling because many financial problems can be mapped onto a quantum-mechanical description. Optimization problems, such as risk assessment and portfolio management, are hard for classical computers to solve with growing number of variables, but scale favourably for quantum computers. At the same time, quantum computation puts finance at risk. A useful, that is, full-scale and fault-tolerant, quantum computer, once developed, will also be able to decrypt classically encrypted information. Therefore, quantum secure communication, for example, based on quantum key distribution (QKD), is heavily discussed for the transmission of sensitive information. QKD relies on the entanglement of single photon pairs shared between a sender and a recipient. Such keys allow for secure encryption and decryption of classically transmitted data, because eavesdropping can be detected through comparison of the quantum state of randomly selected pairs of entangled photons by the two parties. Already today, several big players around the globe are experimenting with metropolitan quantum networks. Commercial enterprises such as ID Quantique offer plug-and-play solutions for QKD to their customers in the finance industry. While a quantum computer able to solve today’s encryption may be decades away, there is the danger of surveillance following the ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ strategy, that is, collecting and storing sensitive data now with the expectation to decrypt and use this information once a full-scale quantum computer is available. Cartlidge’s Technology Feature provides insights into how the finance industry is one of the early adopters of commercial quantum technology.
In nanoscience, quantum mechanics has always had a prominent role in providing a full understanding of experimental observations. Quantum effects are naturally at play at the nanoscale. And yet, in many areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology, they require only minor treatment or can even be ignored to a good extent. More recently, based on the exquisite control achieved in fabrication and nanoscale manipulation, coherence and entanglement have become an explicit resource for functions and characteristics, both for fundamental research and applications, as discussed in a Nature Nanotechnology Focus issue in 2021. At the forefront of what is coined quantum-coherent nanoscience5 are efforts to develop bright and high-fidelity single photon sources, quantum repeaters and memory, as well as scalable, CMOS-based quantum processors.
Nature Nanotechnology will follow these exciting developments closely.
