Purposes and goals of the ERA-Pilot WP1

WP1 -"Drawing a European Guideline for QIST" -aims both at surveying European QIST-related structures as well as at the elaboration of a guideline for future funding of research and development within the area of QIST in Europe.

To achieve the first goal (survey of structures) it is essential to relate to a description of QIST-topics, through defining what techniques are part of QIST, where the borders lie with respect to other scientific and technological areas, etc. A first draft of such a description has been elaborated by the “Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information” (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences; the work carried out within WP1 will be based on this preparatory work. A second task of WP1 will be to draw an overview of the geographical distribution of QIST-competence in Europe. IQOQI has produced a first draft of such a “cartography of excellence” as well; the latter will form the basis for the realization of this task.

The target group of these documents is the national funding and policy community that does not consist of quantum scientists. Therefore a generally understandable overview of the scientific areas of QIST has to be written to give this target group the possibility to get an overview of QIST and to classify its own activities according to internationally accepted terms. Moreover such an overview will be an important support for interested industrial players, for policy in general, for the press and other media, and at least for European publicity. Such an overview might be an important instrument to rise awareness for QIST and its potentials.

In a second step, WP1 will analyse the European research community. An overview will be elaborated that contains the following data:

• classification of European research groups according to the classification scheme developed previously
• evaluation of knowledge within the single groups that comes from past projects
• size of the groups
• geographical allocation
• existing collaboration with other groups

A concrete output from this activity will be a list of potential evaluators of QIST-projects as support for national funding organisations and for the European Commission. All data that will be retrieved within the tasks described above will be put into a database to be used as a basis for further activities and structuring measures.

In a further step, the European activities within QIST will be organized in a database containing

• nationally and European funded projects according to the classification scheme (including the invested sums)
• already existing regional or national structures and funding programmes (including the size of such activities, participating organisations, invested funding, etc.)

Moreover the governance structures concerning QIST within individual European countries will be analysed, retrieving data such as who is responsible for QIST funding, who designs the respective research and technology policy, what ministries and other organisations are involved, etc. The minimum goal wiil be to elaborate a list of responsible persons all over Europe, for further communication within the ERA-Pilot in order to integrate all relevant persons on the political level into the discussion process.

To achieve the WP1 second goal (guideline), an early dialogue between science, policy, and industry will be established. So within WP1 scientists, representatives of policy players, and industrial partners will participate to create a common vision of QIST. This communication will lead to an increase of information for industry concerning future perspectives for its own long-term strategic planning, will give scientists the possibility for targeted basic research according to the needs of future applications, and will help funding organisations to design their programmes in a way that allows applications as well. To achieve this goal, the results of the analysis of strengths and weaknesses of WP2 will be used, and we shall offer a long-term directive for research- and funding-policy on national and European level. To this end, existing QIST related roadmaps will be analysed and their applicability to the European situation will be investigated. A discussion process – both virtually and at the QIST-symposia – will be started.

This work will be based on the activities of the QIPC Roadmap Committee (lead by Peter Zoller, University of Innsbruck) that has been established in September 2004. WP1 will update the draft roadmap in regular intervals to create input for the preparation of FP7 and subsequently FP8.