Technology & Science
Quantum Week 2026: Turing Award to Bennett & Brassard, First Current-Delivering Quantum Battery, and UK’s £2 B Push for Domestic Quantum Computers
On 18 March 2026, quantum technology crossed from theory toward infrastructure as ACM gave the 2025 Turing Award to Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, CSIRO reported the first quantum battery that both charges collectively and outputs electrical current, and the UK government launched a £2 billion program to build fault-tolerant quantum computers on its soil by the early 2030s.
Focusing Facts
- Bennett and Brassard were announced as co-winners of the $1 million 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award on 18 Mar 2026 for inventing BB84 quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation.
- CSIRO’s prototype, published in Light: Science & Applications (Mar 2026), showed 1/√N charging scaling, stored only ~10^9 eV, held charge for nanoseconds, yet for the first time converted it into measurable electrical current via added extraction layers.
- UK ‘ProQure Scaling UK Quantum Computing’ pledges up to £2 billion, with £500 million earmarked for hardware and a goal of operational large-scale British quantum computers by 2030-33.
Perspectives in this article
- Press-release outlets amplifying IBM and ACM messaging
- Mainstream journalism stressing geopolitical and security stakes
- Popular science publications spotlighting speculative or early-stage quantum tech
This cluster of announcements echoes December 1947 when the Bell Labs transistor patent, a modest lab result, coincided with pent-up post-war funding that birthed the modern electronics industry. Bennett and Brassard’s 1984 BB84 protocol—once conference-rejected—now receives computing’s highest honor, signalling the mainstreaming of ideas that were fringe even after Feynman’s 1981 call for quantum machines. Government cash floods in, much as the U.S. poured dollars into semiconductor fabs in the 1960s, illustrating a long-term trend: critical information technologies move from lone theorists, to corporate labs, to national strategic assets. If today’s prototypes overcome decoherence and scaling—still unsolved physics—the 2120s could regard 2026 as the moment quantum left the chalkboard. Yet hype cycles loom: similar exuberance surrounded superconducting computers in the 1950s and expert-systems AI in the 1980s before plateaus set in. The week therefore matters not because problems are solved, but because capital, prizes and prototypes have aligned—an inflection that, on a 100-year arc, either inaugurates a quantum infrastructure age or becomes another cautionary tale of premature technological exuberance.