Explained | What will the new National Quantum Mission achieve? Premium

The National Quantum Mission aims to catapult efforts across India to engineer the delicate quantum features of photons to build advanced sensors and boost the value added by these enterprises.

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.

The Union Cabinet approved the Mission last week at a cost of Rs 6,000 crore. It will be implemented from 2023 to 2031.

Classical sensors are based on familiar principles and as such their mechanisms are intuitive to us. In medical diagnostics, these sensors play a central role in sensing the very feeble signals emitted by atomic nuclei in tissues and detecting diseases. They sense the weak magnetic fields generated by neurons and map the brain’s activity, helping experts detect neurological illnesses at an early stage.

They are also used in the Global Positioning System (GPS) to measure small deviations in space and time, allowing us to build sophisticated transportation and logistics systems on the ground.

When we push the limits of these classical sensors by taking advantage of processes happening on the subatomic scale, our devices access a level of sensitivity that lets us develop game-changing applications.

Consider the ‘squeezed states’ of light. They overcome a detection limit that comes up when we use light to detect physical phenomena. This is because of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: we can’t measure the intensity and the phase of photons (the basic particles of light) with the same accuracy at the same time. That is, there is a natural limit on how accurately we can measure the intensity of light when it is reflected from or absorbed by objects or when the phase of light changes.