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.

我们使用从 1980 年到 2020 年被分配到四个子领域的 66,000 多篇论文，对量子技术 2.0 进行了历史研究。我们将方法参考出版年谱应用于子领域的各自出版集，以确定它们的历史根源和开创性论文。我们总共发现了 126 个，其中 43 个在量子计量学和传感领域，46 个在量子通信和密码学领域，42 个在量子计算领域，33 个在量子信息科学领域——子领域之间有显着的重叠——所有这些都讨论了它们与各自的子领域。我们根据最有影响力的论文比较了子领域之间的相互关系和独特性，并能够在所有四个子领域中推断出一个共同的核心集合，其中包含五个开创性出版物。