Quantum technology, explained: A Big Brains live event

Paul Rand: We are here to talk about quantum tech explained. So Nadya, I wonder if you can give us a real straight basic understanding of quantum technology and how it works.

Nadya Mason: Well, I'll start with just quantum physics to start because that's the basis of quantum technology. Quantum physics refers to the science that governs material at the small scale, the atomic and subatomic scale where classical Newtonian physics just can't explain behavior. So it refers to a set of principles that include things like all matter has both wave-like and particle-like properties, that energy is not continuous but comes in small discrete packets that we call quanta and that matter can be entangled in a way that you can't distinguish its components. So these are things that are really hard to visualize. 

It feels a little bit wild even still to me, many years later after studying it for decades and even its founders. Some of the founders didn't love the theory because it was so crazy, but it absolutely works and it absolutely governs—because the physics is there. Physics is there and it's why we have things like computers and lasers.

It's not some wild out there theory that we're trying to figure out, does it apply to things? It absolutely applies and we use it all the time, every day, all of you do in every technology that you touch. Now I do want to distinguish between quantum, what I call quantum 1.0 and quantum 2.0. 

Paul Rand: We're in 2.

What is quantum 1.0 and quantum 2.0?

Nadya Mason: We're in 2 now. Yeah, of course, right? Because we're evolving. But quantum 1.0 is using this knowledge of quantum physics, which was the theories were developed over a hundred years ago and that physics is what led to things like the laser and nuclear energy and things like that. But now what's been discovered in the past few decades is how to use these quantum principles to manipulate information. So it's bringing the computer age down to the atomic level. So now we can think about how do we use these properties of things like wave properties of matter or entanglement of matter to encode information and develop new technologies like quantum computers.

Paul Rand: Okay. Everybody got it?

Nadya Mason: Quantum 2.0, that's all you need to remember.

Paul Rand: Remember. Quantum 2.0. David, I wonder if I can build on some of the points that Nadya brought up and really looking at understanding how quantum is affecting our everyday lives. She gave some examples, but I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that. What would we be familiar with and understand?

David Awschalom: Well, you mean what we'll be familiar with now or in a few years from now? 

Paul Rand: Well, let's talk about today and then we'll get into tomorrow.

David Awschalom: Well, I think in a way, a lot of us use quantum technologies today when we use GPS. They're quantum clocks that help us navigate, help us understand how financial transactions happen, how timing happens on the internet. A lot of that is determined by clocks that are driven by quantum processes. So whether we know it or not, we're using it. I think more likely than not in the next few years, many of us will experience quantum sensing and quantum communication. I'm sort of curious. I'm guessing everybody here has heard about quantum computing. We comfortable with that?

Really? No. OK. Yeah. But the field is much broader than that, includes sensing and communication. In many ways, those are leading the field and those will be something that we all experience near term. Making sure our financial transactions are secure by processing the information quantum mechanically, navigating without GPS. If you've driven a Lower Wacker drive, you can tell who has GPS and who doesn't. But there are technologies emerging that don't require satellite communication. They use the earth's field with quantum sensors to navigate. I think things like that we'll be experiencing and these will get deeper and richer as time goes on.

What is the difference between superposition and entanglement?

Paul Rand: Let me ask you, we're going to get into the future in a second, but two terms that always come up and you used one of them was super position and entanglement. Can you give a quick explanation what those two things are so people can get it?

David Awschalom: Why me? So sure. So as Nadya said, one of the exciting things about quantum physics is that nature behaves in a way at the atomic level that we just don't see so we don't have much intuition. And superposition entanglement, I would say are the two cornerstones that drive this whole field. And one is like you were both mentioning earlier with our computer technology, right things are zero or one. It's deterministic. They're transistors. Electrons are there, they're not there. In the quantum world, information can be not just zero or one, but an infinite combination of the two, sort of like a coin spinning on the table. Is it heads or is it tails? You don't really know till you hit it, you measure it in some way. So that's super position and it has all sorts of implications. It means memory that today a bit can be zero or one. In a quantum world, a quantum bit or one bit of memory could have a billion pieces of information. So it's staggering. In principle, what this technology can bring. 

Entanglement, that's a little dicey. So I used to be in Southern California and people would ask that, we'd say, “It's like two bodies, one soul.†It sounds great. It has no meaning. 

Entanglement is a phenomena where you could take a piece of information and prepare it in a way that it's shared by a large number of objects. And the interesting thing about this is that the act of looking at one of those objects impacts them all. And the particularly bizarre thing is it's even without a physical connection. But entanglement, the way that all these quantum bits of information are connected, that's sort of the secret sauce of computing and that leads to remarkable scaling technologies. And one last example I can give about that is today if you buy a computer and you want to double its power, you roughly double the number of bits. So you get one chip, you add another chip, you've roughly doubled it.

With a quantum computer, if you had say a few thousand qubits and you want to double it, you just have to add one bit because of this entanglement the way they all share information. So you can see how that scales, right? A few thousand qubits and you actually add another few thousand, you enter the machine two to the several thousand times more powerful. It's astronomical.

Paul Rand: Right.

David Awschalom: So those are the two bits of information. Yeah.

Paul Rand: That's great explanation. And actually I think it's when you start hearing explanations of quantum, what you guys have thrown out really gets to the point of what you hear consistently. –

Nadya Mason: I was going to say, superposition is a little bit easier to visualize because if you think about water waves and you think about two waves and then you put them on top of each other, you get a bigger wave and that's sort of the principle of superposition. You can think about draw squiggles and add them together and where the squiggles go and cancel each other out. Entanglement is just we can't visualize it. And so it's one of those things I think you just have to accept it. You accept the fact that this is how nature works and then you work with it. And some of quantum physics is like that. And once you accept some of these hard to visualize concepts, you can really broaden your mind. So you just think, okay, this is how it works. Now what?

Paul Rand: Excellent. Let's talk about Richard Feynman if we can. And he was a quantum theory, really expert if that's the right word or just a towering figure. And he actually, the quote that's attributed to him is: “I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.†Is that true?

Fred Chong: I think it's fairly true. I think that as Nadya mentioned that even the people who originated the theories were a little uncomfortable with them and it's only through observation that it seems that they're consistent, right? I'm trained as a classical computer scientist and I was not always in the quantum field. I think in the beginning when I first got into it, actually a friend of mine, Ike Chuang, who's a physicist at MIT, he got me into this and he gave this talk and he sort of gave this introduction to quantum computation and I was like, “Ike, that is the greatest talk effort. This is like the first one I really understood.†He said, “Oh, that talk was carefully engineered to make you think you understand what's going on.“

Paul Rand: Kind of like this talk.

Fred Chong: That's right. So it's kind of like what we're trying to do. But I think if you think about it, even in computer science and classical computing, most people who work on computer systems, who write computer software don't have a very low level understanding of the electronics, the electrons and devices that are underneath there. And in the complexity of our world, we're not really in a position to have to get to that level of that depth of understanding to work with these things. And so to some degree, every computer scientist, every computational person, every systems person works at a certain level of abstraction and can get to that depth of understanding. I do feel like we're at a point in quantum computation, which is still pretty early and we'll talk about that later where it is useful to have some lower level understanding to get sort of the best functionality, the best efficiency out of some of the machines, but it has always been the case that most systems you can't completely understand.

I think that there are different levels that people can work with these things and even the whole field works on sort of some assumptions based on some observations and theories that we have.

How is UChicago leading the field of quantum?

Paul Rand: Okay, excellent. Very good. At the beginning of our discussion, the hands went up about how often we hear about quantum. What we also hear a lot about, David, is Chicago and we are in a hotspot. How did we end up in a hotspot?

David Awschalom: Well, I think the University of Chicago and the city deserve a huge amount of credit because when this was proposed about a dozen years or so ago, it wasn't obvious this would become the field that it is today and it took a lot of risk and a lot of bravery by the university actually to invest in it at the scale they did. And I think what made Chicago very special is they embraced the idea that a lot of us propose that you can't do this alone. You need to do this for the first time, start a new field in close collaboration with industry and the national labs and do it as a major collaboration, but from the very beginning. Don't wait for 10 years of academic work and think about translating it, do it as a partnership. It's a very different model for any university and certainly different

And I think this has just exploded. This worked incredibly well. It attracted students from all over the world. It attracted company researchers to invest their time and effort here. It brought talent to this region. It brought some investment to this region, but I think most of all, it brought, I would say infectious enthusiasm. It grows something that was risky but scientifically exciting. And so now we are in a time where it's becoming a technology and Chicago's really uniquely positioned and we're quite fortunate to have major national labs here. And ironically, it turns out these billion dollar facilities are really critical for developing the technologies. This is an atom scale technology. We've never done anything like this and you need special tools to see the atoms, to control them, to understand the material. National synchrotrons facilities that the government's graded building happen to be here in Illinois and near Chicago. So a lot of serendipity, I'd say a lot of bravery and remarkable talent that we're able to bring here.

What impact will quantum have on the economy?

Paul Rand: Fabulous. There's a lot of thought about the impact economically that this could have. And we certainly have the governor involved in this to some pretty significant degrees and other types of investment being made. How do you think about it?

Nadya Mason: I only hesitated because I think it's not really how I think about it. It's how- How it is? Yeah, how it is. Economics, right? That's the way it is. But the quantum economy right now is a couple billion dollars. If you just look at how much money is being spent on quantum companies, the revenues, the outcomes, it's a couple billion dollars today. There are estimates that that will grow to a hundred billion dollars in 10 years. That's tremendous growth. This is really an emerging technology.

Paul Rand: And that growth is going to come in where?

Nadya Mason: Through quantum computing companies, through quantum sensors, through applications, through networks, through insurance companies that can improve their revenue by having better algorithms that determine whom to insure and when, and how, by better transportation networks, by more secure communications, less money spent in things that don't work, more money spent on things that do in better medical care. All of these, everything that quantum will touch and we'll talk more about that later, will contribute to the quantum economy. So if you start thinking about it broadly affecting finance, affecting healthcare, affecting pharmaceuticals, affecting transportation, it goes from maybe a hundred billion dollar industry in 10 years to possibly even a trillion dollar industry in 10 years, depending on the estimates of how much it touches and where it goes. So it's huge. And I want to emphasize that there's expected to be something like 200,000 quantum jobs created in the Midwest in the next 10 years.

And those are 60% non-PhD jobs. So things that people who know how to deal with vacuum systems and construction work and laser work, all of these associated things are going to be real jobs coming. So the quantum economy is real. You mentioned the governor, the state has invested tremendously. $500 million Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park as well as for buildings on the U-Chicago campus. 

Paul Rand: Can you touch on that park very quickly?

Nadya Mason: So the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park is, you can think of it's a research park for quantum. So you can't just … Quantum is a new technology. It requires the quantum bits sometimes have to be cooled down to very low temperatures to process. So you need special infrastructure for these quantum technologies. This is a research park that's designed to have that infrastructure. So we'll have cooling elements that will work with different types of quantum computers so that they run effectively.

Paul Rand: Got it.

Nadya Mason: It'll have test beds that the government is investing in to bring together different sorts of quantum platforms and make sure that they connect to each other, that they work. It'll have micro electronics companies are coming in. So the idea is to really start putting together the elements that will build this quantum ecosystem economically. If I can give one example, I can say that if you think about what happened in the Bay Area with Silicon Valley, now we think of a hotbed of innovation, but that started in 1939 with Hewlett-Packard, an electronics company from the 30s coming in and setting up base in the Bay Area in Palo Alto. After 20 years later, we got the first semiconducting companies. 20 years later, the first computer companies. 20 years later, the first internet companies, 20 years later, the first AI companies. That's a trend, right? These are building on each other.