Historical Roots and Seminal Papers of Quantum Technology 2.0

We present a historical study of Quantum Technology 2.0 using more than 66,000 papers from 1980 to 2020 that had been assigned to four subfields. We applied the method reference publication year spectroscopy to respective publication sets of the subfields in order to identify their historical roots and seminal papers. We found 126 of them in total, 43 in quantum metrology and sensing, 46 in quantum communication and cryptography, 42 in quantum computing, and 33 in quantum information science-with a significant overlap between subfields-which are all discussed in their relevance for the respective subfield. We compared the subfields regarding their interrelationship and distinctiveness in terms of their most influential papers and were able to deduce a common core set of five seminal publications in all four subfields.

Automated summary

We conducted a historical study of Quantum Technology 2.0 using a large number of papers from 1980 to 2020. The study identified the historical roots and seminal papers in four subfields, namely quantum metrology and sensing, quantum communication and cryptography, quantum computing, and quantum information science. The analysis revealed an overlap between the subfields and a common core set of influential papers across all four subfields.