Basic Research Perspective on Quantum Information Science for the Aerospace Community

Abstract

Scientific and technological progress has repeatedly revolutionized society, from the invention of steam-power-driven machines that brought forth the Industrial Age to the development of the transistor that sparked the Information Age. As societies and economies become more connected through global communication networks and reliant on computational power, the demand for faster, more efficient, and secure information capabilities escalates commensurately. Enter Quantum Information Science (QIS) (QIS), a field founded on the physical laws of quantum mechanics that introduce extraordinary different and powerful paradigms for generating, manipulating, measuring, securing, and processing information. While many quantum effects are generally well understood and form the basis of widely exploited current technology, QIS is still a richly underexplored research area. This overview provides a basic research perspective on the foundational resources that empower QIS, the main challenges in exploiting QIS for practical applications, and the need for input from researchers outside quantum physics, such as those from the aerospace community, to stimulate new ideas and advance progress in QIS. This paper introduces key QIS concepts and continues with discussions on each of the following subareas: sensing, computation and algorithms, networks, and information security. The paper concludes with an outlook of the field as it relates to aerospace.