What will India’s new National Quantum Mission achieve?

Sensors – systems that help detect electric and magnetic fields, rotation and acceleration, measure time, and image biological systems with increasing accuracy – are an inalienable part of essential enterprises like healthcare, security, and environmental monitoring today and practically indispensable for day-to-day life. The National Quantum Mission, launched by the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India, aims to catapult efforts across the nation to engineer and utilise the delicate quantum features of photons and subatomic particles to build advanced sensors that boost the value added by these enterprises and to support sustainable development. As far as quantum-sensing is concerned, the Mission will focus on research and technology development to build a plethora of devices and systems, including: Magnetic sensors that can sense magnetic fields that are a million-times weaker than the earth’s magnetic field, using virtual atoms trapped in diamonds, atoms cooled and trapped at near absolute-zero temperature, collections of atoms at room temperature, etc. Precise clocks that will lose less than one second in more than 300 billion years, allowing us to develop navigation devices that are more than 1,000-times precise to help study the origin of the universe – an open question in astrophysics Navigation devices that can operate autonomously, without the need for GPS signals – an important part of autonomous driving systems and deep space navigation Affordable sensors that can detect anatomical changes within human bodies with minimal intervention The Mission will also help attain these at a cost that is affordable and scalable for a wide range of applications.