A professor in the College of Arts and Sciences recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue work on the development of tools to build a quantum computer. 

This grant will fund physics professor Britton Plourde’s research to advance the development of quantum computing using qubits, the basic unit of information in a quantum computer, to power the next generation of super computers.  

Plourde’s physics team is working with a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a collaborative project. The Daily Orange spoke with Plourde to discuss the future of quantum computers.  

The Daily Orange: What is a quantum computer? 

Britton Plourde: A quantum computer is a computer made up of elements that follow the laws of quantum mechanics. Instead of bits, like in our laptops or phones, that are either zero or one, a quantum bit can be superpositioned — a combination of zero and one at the same time.  

The D.O.: What are the capabilities of a quantum computer? 

B.P.: People have been trying to build a quantum computer for the past 20 to 25 years now, and the field was really kicked off by some theoretical ideas by physicists and computer scientists in the 1990s. That showed that if you could build a quantum computer, that computer would solve certain problems that are effectively impossible on a regular computer. 

(There are) dramatic differences. Problems that the best supercomputer we have on the Earth today would take longer than the age of the universe to solve. A big enough quantum computer could solve that problem in a few hours. 

The D.O.: How did you receive the grant? Did you apply or were you nominated? 

B.P.:  I applied.  

The D.O.: How has this quantum computer industry grown in the last 10 years? 

B.P.: It has grown a lot. When the field started out, there were several different ways people were trying to build quantum computers. 

The system that I focused on and have been working on since 2000, when I finished my Ph.D., is based on micro fabricated circuits made out of superconductors. Since then, that approach has evolved in two leading ways people are trying to build quantum computers. 

The particular approach I follow is especially appealing to companies that already make computer chips because it uses a lot of the same techniques to make them. International Business Machines Corporation has been working on this exact same kind of superconducting quantum computers for some time, and we have been collaborating with them very closely since 2009. 

The D.O.: Can you explain how qubits are unstable and why that is such a challenge to work with? 

B.P.: It is not so much the qubit that is unstable, but whenever you prepare one of these quantum states, the state itself is very fragile. If there is any noise around the chip, that will tend to make it lose the superposition. 

One of the hardest things we have to do is make the qubits in these weird quantum superpositions, but be as immune to noise as possible. 

The D.O.: What are the downsides of the quantum computer? 

B.P.: There aren’t any real downsides. The main thing to emphasize is that quantum computers are not ever going to displace regular computers.  

There will be these dedicated machines working in labs (so) that people who have specialized problems that can really get a significant speed-up from running on a quantum computer can speed their job up. 

The D.O.: What are the upsides of the quantum computer? 

B.P.: There are some really exciting potential areas down the road. Some of the things quantum computers can be good for are things like simulating quantum chemistry.  

If you work at a pharmaceutical company and want to develop a new drug, if you can think of a particular molecule and you want to simulate the chemical properties of that molecule, those are all things that are really hard to calculate, even with a supercomputer. A quantum computer can do that kind of calculation very efficiently.  

The D.O.: How will you be working with the physics department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison? 

B.P.: I have a close collaborator there. We have been working together for the past 10 years. There is another lab in Wisconsin that works on similar circuits and have similar capabilities in their labs. So we have had joint projects over the past 10 years. 

We send devices back and forth, sometimes the experiments happen in my lab and sometimes they happen in Wisconsin. 

The D.O.: How has Syracuse University helped in this research? 

B.P.: The university provides the lab space where I have my labs running, they provide the infrastructure for being able to do experimental physics. We have an excellent machine shop that builds that helps build some of the hardware.  

That’s what universities do, they provide the infrastructure for experiments to happen. 

Published on January 24, 2018 at 10:58 pm

Contact Olivia: olcole@syr.edu