Tennessee takes a quantum leap toward emerging technology

By KATE COIL
TT&C Assistant Editor

Forget Silicon Valley. Tennessee leaders expect American’s new Quantum Valley to be in the Volunteer State. 

Leaders in Tennessee’s quantum industry – including University of Tennessee Chattanooga (UTC) Quantum Center Director Dr. Rick Mukherjee, EPB of Chattanooga Vice President of Government and Community Relations Evann Freeman, Tennessee Division of TennCare Chief Information Officer Hugh Hale, and Deloitte US Quantum Cyber Readiness Lead Colin Soutar – discussed how the state is building the future of quantum during the Tennessee Digital Summit panel “The Future Frontier: Realizing Tennessee’s Quantum Leap.”

Based on quantum bits or qubits, quantum technology enables computers to process millions of operations simultaneously. Made through quantum engineering, quantum technology – including quantum computers and sensors – can process and calculate at speeds and magnitudes far beyond most average technology, allowing for revolutionary advances in a variety of fields. 

Quantum technology can handle models, information loads, and complexities more efficiently, sustainably, accurately, and with greater scalability than modern computers. Tennessee is hoping to be on the forefront of this emerging technology, which is also expected to be a major economic engine.

BUILDING AN ECOSYSTEM

Mukherjee is the first director of the UTC Quantum Center, which was established 18 months ago. While the UTC Center was the first in the state, Mukherjee said similar centers have opened since.

“Now we have many, many quantum institutions coming up at various universities and private institutions, which is a good thing for Tennessee,” he said. “We want to build quantum education, the quantum workforce, and quantum research throughout the state.”

The FY26-27 state budget commits $20 million to the future of quantum in Tennessee. In partnership with UTC and Vanderbilt University, EPB of Chattanooga is building the EPB Quantum Center, the nation’s first facility to provide commercial access to both a trapped-ion quantum computer and a photonics-based local quantum network. EPB is also a member of the Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative (CQC), which includes other partners such as the UTC Quantum Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), the Tennessee Valley Authority, and private sector partner IONQ. 

One of the major advances from EPB is opening the next generation of quantum internet. Freeman said the municipal utility expanded from electricity to fiber broadband in 2009. To build on that infrastructure, Freeman said EPB realized some new opportunities through quantum. 

“We found if you add the energy component to communications, you have the ability for an electric grid to speak to itself and to learn,” Freeman said. “We patented some of those technologies and worked with ORNL and the Department of Energy (DOE) to see how we could best optimize the electric grid. We have been doing different projects with ORNL on microgridding.” 

The result was a partnership between EPB, ORNL, DOE, and quantum services provider Quibitekk. The partnership worked on several award-winning projects and led EPB officials to realize most quantum technology cannot be accessed outside a university or national lab environment. 

“From us trying to be a resource to our community similar to how we had put in the fiber initially, we knew that it’s not our job to tell you what to do on the internet, but we know if we give you pretty fast internet you can do a lot of cool things,” Freeman said. “It’s the same with quantum. We don’t really know where that future is going to lead, but it’s our job to put in the infrastructure so our community can have this technology and use this technology. We want Tennessee to play a significant role in the nation for quantum technology.”

QUANTUM EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

Tennessee’s quantum future begins with education.

“I believe that knowledge empowers individuals and societies,” Mukherjee said. “Education starts with training the future of your society. Society, as a whole, needs to be aware of the possibilities. Instead of Silicon Valley, I think there is a good chance to build the Quantum Valley in Tennessee, which could then lead to the next generation of companies and industries, the Microsofts and Metas of quantum.”

While UTC has several doctoral paths for quantum students, Mukherjee said it is just as important that quantum education is offered at other levels. 

“UTC has a quantum certificate program where undergraduates from any major can take these four courses and become quantum trained, he said. “What we do know is that you don’t need a doctorate or master’s degree to play a major role in the quantum industry. There is going to be a dearth of workforce, and we want to train them at all levels.”

By having this technology available, Freeman said Tennessee will develop future businesses and the future of the workforce. 

“As we have been going down this road in quantum is how you bring all of the knowledgeable folks together and build an ecosystem that is going to be successful,” he said. “The economic development and optimization will help companies both save and make money. I also see this as an opportunity for Tennessee, in particular for our elementary kids all up through college, to learn and move with this technology.”

On the research side, Mukherjee said UTC is focusing on three areas: quantum sensing, quantum networking, and quantum information theory in computing. 

“These are three hot areas where there is a lot of complementary research being done, but we are also very invested in how to take this fundamental knowledge and solve every day, real world problems. We want to see optimization for logistics, finance, healthcare centers to use quantum algorithms, machine-learning, and advanced machine learning.”

In many ways, Mukherjee said artificial intelligence (AI) is paving the way for the quantum future. 

“The common consensus of all the experts working on machine learning is that we are not going to have complete quantum machine learning from day one,” Mukherjee said. “That first technology will be hybrid. The AI revolution that we are seeing today is bringing new breakthroughs  every day. There is a lot of treasure to uncover from classical AI, and now the question is becoming how do you integrate that with quantum principles and run those things on a quantum computer to deliver new advances? There are things that could be missed by classical machine learning that quantum can capture. For the next five to ten years, you are going to be seeing hybrid models of quantum machine learning before you get fully fleshed out quantum by itself.”

RISKS AND REWARDS

Soutar said because quantum is so good at discerning patterns out of massive amounts of data, it also presents unique challenges for cybersecurity. Using quantum technology, it takes much less time and effort to break through the encryptions that protect sensitive data and operations. 

“There are a lot of geopolitical concerns around it, standards, and compliances. We are starting to see much more awareness across the financial industry and government. There are steps you can take, but you have to address these risk factors so they don’t compromise all of the great things quantum can do with simulation and modelling.”

Hale said that security is important for agencies like TennCare that are protecting decades of data from some of the state’s most vulnerable residents. 

“Quantum can analyze things we can’t see today because there is so much data,” Hale said. “There is also a lot of suspicion that data, even though it’s encrypted, has already been stolen by a rogue nation or others, but it’s still encrypted. Quantum will make that data no longer encrypted sometime in the future. Our current security measures won’t matter as much when someone is running quantum with AI. We need to be ahead of the game before others get there, from a security perspective, to protect ourselves.”

Hale said governments will have to be on the forefront of data protection in the new quantum world.

“You can lock every door you know; what you can’t lock is the doors that you don’t know exist,” Hale said. “We need a way to defend against that and protect our data. You don’t have to have the most security, but you do have to more security than someone else.”

As algorithms generating random numbers play a major role in encryption, Mukherjee says there is a legitimate fear quantum computers could break current encryption systems.

“It is also true that you can create a more rigorous random number generator using quantum numbers,” Mukherjee said. “There is a lot of research going on about what is the quantum equivalent of classical encryption tactics, such as prime number factorization or credit card encryption. The other side is quantum key distribution. That relates to a concept called entanglement. Because quantum states are so fragile, as soon as someone tries to eavesdrop or intercept the message, it destroys itself immediately. It’s almost like the technology in Mission Impossible where Tom Cruise throws the glasses and it destroys the message.”