Gig City enters the quantum age — what does it mean for Chattanooga?
EPB installed — and successfully tested — one of the first commercially available quantum networks in the country. Here’s what to know.
Graphic by Ian-Alijah Bey
By William Newlin
Updated April 15, 2024
A new kind of network
Below some of the streets in downtown Chattanooga, quantum technology has taken root. EPB has installed hardware along its existing fiber-optic cables that creates and sends “quantum bits” (qubits), which can power a range of cutting-edge technologies. While still in their infancy, quantum applications are expected to revolutionize cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and other areas.
EPB partnered with Qubitekk, a San Diego-based company with a Chattanooga office, to build a commercial quantum network, which went online in 2023 as a subscription-based service available to researchers and private industry alike.
“We expect many new technologies to leverage this infrastructure,” said Duncan Earl, Qubitekk’s chief technical officer. “(It) really is an opportunity to focus on application discovery.”
Their long-term goal is both to push quantum technology forward and prepare Chattanooga to see economic gains as the industry grows. The first test for Chattanooga’s newest network came last December.
Qunnect, a New York-based company that also builds hardware for quantum networks, successfully operated its own tech with Qubitekk’s qubits and EPB’s cables. According to a press release, the demonstration was an “important step” for EPB in determining how to expand its quantum investment.
In March 2024, the Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative launched, aiming to create local workforce development and infrastructure initiatives related to quantum technology.
“Chattanooga will eventually stop being Gig City and will become a quantum city,” said Jim Ingraham, EPB’s vice president of strategic research during an interview with Chattamatters in spring 2023. However, he also said then that EPB’s priority is still investing in its fiber system, which supports the fastest internet in the world.
What, exactly, is quantum technology?
The qubits passed along EPB’s fiber cables are specially configured photons, or particles of light. Due to certain properties of quantum physics, qubits have the potential to process more complex information than classical computing.
Cybersecurity is one of the main practical applications of quantum technology today. With qubits, users can generate unbreakable codes to protect encrypted messages. At a very basic level, people trying to decode the messages will alter the qubits in a way that gives away their presence.
“Your communication is always secure, because the hacker is detectable,” said UTC physics professor Tian Li.
Li’s focus is in quantum optics, one of a number of research fields developing new quantum technology. Before coming to UTC last fall, Li and his colleagues at Texas A&M built a microscope equipped with quantum light to create better contrast in cancer cell imagery.
Aside from producing better quality images, the quantum light also extended the life of cells by hitting them with fewer protons. Li sees marginal gains like more time for cell observation as the “why” behind quantum research.
UTC will house one of the 10 user nodes branching from Chattanooga’s quantum network. There, Li and his colleagues will access qubits for additional research, such as building hardware that can send qubits over longer distances.
“Once you have the infrastructure, you can try out a lot of things,” Li said. “The same way you can build a really good Lego (project) out of a lot of random blocks.”
What a quantum network means for Chattanooga
The launch of EPB’s Smart Grid in 2010 provided the infrastructure for a Quantum Network. In the first 10 years of its operations, the Smart Grid generated nearly $2.7 billion in community impact through job creation, education, investment and more, according to a 2020 study.
"Access to the world’s fastest community-wide internet and the most advanced smart grid power distribution system will continue to benefit Chattanooga’s economic development," Ingraham said.
He added that the EPB Quantum Network will create more opportunities for the city, beyond what even can be calculated today.
“We want to make sure that we know how to operate in that world,” Ingraham said. “And to do that, we have to have the technology, we have to have the networks, we have the people who have the knowledge and skills to manage those things.”
The first users of the quantum network will likely be IT companies or researchers like Li who develop technology for quantum applications. And Earl thinks the first adopters of new quantum products will be those looking to protect sensitive information like government organizations, banks, and utilities.
According to a 2023 report from consulting firm McKinsey & Company, investments in quantum technologies — mostly by venture capitalists — has skyrocketed since 2019. The car, chemicals, finance, and life sciences industries have the most to gain from quantum leaps, per the report, and could collectively increase in value by $1.3 trillion over the next decade.
Chattanoogans might one day see better artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and even video game graphics from advances in quantum. But we won’t see a qubit-powered internet anytime soon.
“This technology, because it is so complicated, it isn't something that any one company can do,” Qubitekk's Earl said. “It's going to take many companies in the United States and the world to bring a lot of these applications and benefits to fruition.”
A deeper dive into quantum physics
Talk of qubits and quantum cybersecurity can sound futuristic. For the most part, it is. Despite his 18 years of experience at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Earl said the phenomena that make quantum technologies work remain mysterious. They’re called superposition and entanglement.
Superposition is the idea that a photon (and other quantum systems) can be in multiple states at the same time. When the physical properties of a photon - such as polarization – can have many different configurations, it’s value is ambiguous until someone actually measures them. So, before they’re measured, quantum physics shows that photons exist as a sum of multiple configurations, or a superposition.
Entanglement refers to when two or more particles become linked. Any change to one particle simultaneously impacts the others even if they’re far apart — a proven phenomenon that doesn’t square with traditional, classical physics. However, direct observation of entangled particles takes them out of superposition: You can only measure one configuration rather than a combination of many.
Despite the strange physics of superposition and entanglement, they’re essential to quantum cybersecurity, which is one practical application of quantum research today.
“People working in the field are still scratching their heads about what's really occurring here,” Earl said.
The key for now is that it is occurring. Earl sees a quantum revolution on the horizon similar to the rise of the internet, but it’ll take a while working with physics that has baffled scientists going back to Einstein.
