2026: A Quantum Odyssey
What WAS the monolith anyway?
My conversation with Delta Gold Technologies was probably the first time I’ve been left without a basic understanding of the technology in question. That’s not to say that I always “get it” on the first try, but I always get enough to at least write a draft article, which I then submit for review and fix what I need to fix. In this case, the gold nanocluster technology is at an early enough stage that I’ve only got a 2001-style monolith. We can look at it and poke it, but secrecy demands that we try to figure out what it is.
A Little History
CEO Richard Michael Jones is actually a mining engineer by trade. He was reading papers about gold behaving as an extreme catalyst, although the mechanism wasn’t known, and he wondered “What do precious metals do scientifically?”
A colleague discovered the quantum tie-in, and they formed IP with the University of Toronto. Penn State was doing something similar-but-different, so they bought that IP and brought the two universities together to collaborate. The company is creating collaborations and partnerships because it would otherwise cost billions of dollars to do something with this.
Blue’s Clues
For IP purposes, they won’t compare their technology to a current modality. But here’s what we know.
They’re taking a “materials science approach” to a qubit, so fabrication is involved.
Although gold sounds expensive, which they hope will deter competitors, they say that 3 grams ought to be enough, so the material cost is negligible. Think nitrogen vacancies in synthetic diamonds; we don’t really talk about the cost of small synthetic diamonds.
The University of Toronto has a machine for laying individual gold atoms.
They will use cryogenics to start but may not need it for superconducting.
The qubit promises to be more stable than other modalities.
The good news is that your guess is guaranteed to be better than mine. I’m basically envisioning what’s in this Penn State article, but we’ve already been told that that’s not it.
Inconclusion
The first IP file will be less than a year, which means that we will have to wait for answers. They’ll start looking at commercialization in 3 years, so we’ll learn even more then. But they say that they’re looking at quantum science from the beginning and thinking about quantum error correction (QEC) from the beginning, and they may adapt their approach along the way. So, even if your guess is right today, you may still end up being wrong tomorrow.
Conclusion
I’m basically a prehistoric hominin with no real idea what I’m looking at, poking Delta Gold Technologies for insights. Fortunately, I take consolation in knowing that 2001 is one of the great classics, and hopefully you’ll remember this article fondly as well.
Image generated by Google’s language model AI.