You'll also need to pay for the people doing the research to buy houses, have cars, retirement savings, raise families, and have a decent quality of life too.
Add that to a bare bones optics lab with a few staff and you will be running about $1 million startup costs for benches, lasers, optics, closed loop cryogencics, He4, interferometers, etc, plus half a million a year salary costs for 3-5 people in a low cost of living area.
It would also need job security to be competitive with going into something like data science, making the startup costs a careers worth of funding otherwise it would be insanity to choose.
Source: PhD in quantum optics, no longer do science.
Add that to a bare bones optics lab with a few staff and you will be running about $1 million startup costs for benches, lasers, optics, closed loop cryogencics, He4, interferometers, etc, plus half a million a year salary costs for 3-5 people in a low cost of living area.
It would also need job security to be competitive with going into something like data science, making the startup costs a careers worth of funding otherwise it would be insanity to choose.
Source: PhD in quantum optics, no longer do science.