The Einstein Lecture: The Quantum Computing Revolution

if I look inside a computer I can actually take out the chip inside and that's how big it is so though it's roughly the size you know a couple of inches square and the amazing thing about this chip is there are now 14 billion transistors on this chip so you imagine the size of the smallest transistor I'd have to break that up 14 billion times so you can imagine how small it would be it'd be smaller than anything I can see [Applause] okay so good evening everyone I'm very excited I've got a slightly different lecture what I normally give which I'm very excited to give to you but I guess one of the things it's very important to start with this is National Science Week and that's a very important week for Australia because I think science is critical for our future and if you step back and think what a science mean you know scientists aspire aspire to be people that generate fundamental knowledge and fundamental truths it's a global community of people that work very closely together we get on incredibly well and they work together because they're trying to make the world a better place and what you find is generally their values of working together actually transcend the national values that they grew up with so you form this international community of people that try strive to make the world even better than it is but by working together in a collaborative nature diversity is absolutely critical to there so you'll see large research teams across the world that collaborate with everyone because it's the concept of ideas from all those different nationalities different genders that help you to understand the way the world is and really that's what science is all about in this in this lecture tonight what I hope to do is to take you through the world of quantum physics leading into quantum computing and to bring those ideas of community with it about how working together how trying to get to the fundamental truths lead us to new knowledge and new knowledge leads us to understand the world in a better way now for me what's fascinating about this journey I'm going to take you back in time more than 100 years is to look at some of those first communities that developed over 100 years ago and so look at those people and realize that actually they used to play music together they used to go for drinks together they used to sit around the coffee table in pubs in cafes and talk about science but what's amazing is at that time they were understanding the world was very different to what we have now and so there were ideas concepts that they came up with but they never knew where they were going and they never even knew they were real or concepts so they debated heavily and science is all about debating to try and understand the fundamental truths one of the things I find fascinating some cases more than a hundred years before those ideas and concepts could be tested and used for something that they thought 100 years ago would be useful and so I'm going to take you through that journey of of quantum theory and how it evolved to the point where along the way people started to make technology better and better to be able to design and build devices at the level that could actually test those theories and turn them into reality I'm going to give you two equations I'm going to give you some ideas of some of the experiments that we do and I'm gonna all the way through this highlight how Australia is in a phenomenal position to benefit from this so Australia back in 2000 set up some of the first centers in quantum computing and they've been going for a long time they're the envy of the world other people are trying to replicate them and what that means is for the last 20 years we have been building our workforce in our capacity to be ready for the quantum revolution where it comes and finally what I do hope to do is to encourage younger scientists to realize some of the skills they're gonna need if they want to join this field so I'm going to start with this picture taking you all the way back to 1927 now I've come to love this picture for many reasons it's a conference that was held in Brussels in Belgium I'm going to look at some of the people there these are the people that used to go and have drinks together and they were playing music together and if I start to zoom in and highlight some of the people you might recognize we have earring Schroedinger who was famous in quantum physics for the Schrodinger wave equation we have Wolfgang Pauli and Pauli talked about the idea that electrons on atoms could have a spin and he came up with this idea that little bio magnets if they were in the same orientation you tried to pull them together they'd repel so he came up with the power exclusion principle we have Verner Heisenberg who came up with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle so you could either know the energy or the location of a particle but never both at the same time we have pizza to buy who's famous for the Debye links which is looking at the scattering of electrons and x-rays and materials we have William Bragg who looks at solids with x-rays and determine their crystal structure we have Dirac who work with Schrodinger to develop fundamental quantum theory we have Compton who's famous for constant scattering although these people have had things named after them Louis de Broglie who looked at the wavelengths of particles of radiation Max Born who looked at the statistics of how things interacted Niels Bohr who looked at atoms and realized that atoms had shells and electrons could move between the shells in quantized energy levels we have oving Langmuir he was a chemist this films called langmuir-blodgett films named after him we have Max Planck Max Planck is famous for the photoelectric effect we have Mary Curie who discovered radiation we have Heinrich Lawrence who looked at the Lorentz force the magnetic properties on own particles we have Albert Einstein after this lectures named and most people are aware of we have Charles Thomson reason Wilson who realized that you could see charged particles moving if you put them in a vapor and then we have own Williams Richardson who looked at the thermoelectric effect now so what's amazing about this picture is there's 29 people at this conference and 17 of them won Nobel Prizes that's phenomenal discuss to show they were all together all discussing things at the same time that there's a community of people who have set off and kicked off the world of quantum physics so let's go back and look at those Marie Curie 1903 she was actually the first of those to win a Nobel Prize and she won it for radioactivity so she was looking at uranium she went it with a husband Pierre and Pierre had designed something called an electroscope that can tell whether they've got charged particles and she took his design and she put it near a mineral of a wreck of uranium and she realized that the air around it was charged and there she discovered radiation she won the Nobel Prize for that discovery but then she won this second level price many years later about eight years later in chemistry so she's won a Nobel Prize in Physics and one in chemistry and there she discovered polonium and radium and polonium was named after the country she came from which is Poland and with radium she found that radium could be used to treat people that had tumors and it would kill the tumor cells faster than the healthy cells she's had a pretty big impact then we look at Max Planck and Planck's constant their funding Max Planck was employed by an electric company and he was told take a light bulb make it as bright as you can with as little energy as you can and that was his challenge in the company so as a physicist we always get us to do the impossible and he came up with the idea of blackbody radiation he realized that radiation was emitted from a solid a black solid one that's normally opaque that you can't see through but it only comes out at certain frequency and he came up with the equation e is equal to H mu where H is now off the Planck's constant shortly after that Albert Einstein won a Nobel Prize because he came up with the photoelectric effect now he's obviously synonymous with genius and there are many things he did and normally equation you're most related to his is equal to MC square to the equivalence of mass in energy but he actually won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect so when you shine light on something it emits energy and the energy is quantized and actually linked together with Planck's constant then we've got a ring Schrodinger and he kind of really followed up from born and so born looked at the idea that electrons in atoms move around between the different shells and they emit radiation and once that was great and it could explain how high Jonathan worked when you get to more complex atoms it no longer work because electrons can behave both as particles in his wave annoing Schrodinger really came up with the concept of wave particle duality and then finally one of the people I like a lot is Richard Feynman and Richard Feynman was someone that came up with what's known as the Fineman diagrams he took how particles interact and he represented them graphically so something that was very mathematical he decided to put in a picture to describe how those interactions could occur and that's helped people understand things in a very different way now a lot of people like flamin firemen actually has his lectures which were recorded back in the 1950s and 60s he actually has them online at the Caltech web site so you can actually see him talking and he's incredibly charismatic but one of the other reasons I like Richard Feynman which he was one of the earliest pioneers of quantum computing so back in 1982 there was a conference at MIT on the physics of computing and he really started the idea that actually if you could somehow use in computers quantum you could actually get a way of doing calculations in parallel he was really the first person that came up with that concept and it wasn't until 1994 that Peter Shore came up with the idea of an algorithm a quantum algorithm so actually a mathematical way of using quantum physics to do something very valuable now the algorithm he came up with is what's called the factorization algorithm so when you go to a bank and you type in your four digit PIN code it takes your number and it encodes it in a very large prime number and if anyone wants to try and figure out what your four digit PIN code is they have to work out what the prime factors of those numbers are so a prime number is a number that's only divisible by 1 and itself so if you take 7 & 7 multiplied together get 49 it's an easy calculation but if I said his 49 what are the prime factors relatively simple if that number is any two digits 49 but if I had a 768 bit number and I asked you to work out what the prime factors were it actually took us about three years in 2010 with all the computing power we had at the time to work it out so that's what keeps the security of all your banking systems and this quantum algorithm is predicted to break that almost instantaneously what that was great but there was a thing called the no-cloning theorem and that's the idea if you have a quantum state you can't replicate the quantum state and to give you a sense of why this is important in classical computing when you do a calculation you run a calculation through and you run it through four or five times in parallel and if one of the transistors is not working you look at the out all the answers and if the most likely answer is four out of five you know that's the one to go for and so that's what we call quantum erica is a classical error correction you need to run it in parallel many times but in the quantum world it was believed that you couldn't run it in parallel because to create another quantum state you actually have to ask the quantum state something and the process of asking takes information away from it so the view is there's no way in the quantum world that you could do error correction and in 1995 andrew Steen working with Peter shor came up with a theoretical way where you could take a quantum state you could interact it with other quantum states and then uninterrupted and bring it back to its original state and in such a way you would be able to do Eric so as a threat evil construct shortly after in 1996 Lou Grover came up with another album called the Grover a broom and this was something called the fast database search so another quantum algorithm that suddenly people realized was incredibly powerful so imagine you have a database with a billion entries roughly on average in a classical computer you have to look through all of them and roughly 500 million times you will find the answer with this quantum algorithm you would only have to do for 30,000 lookups so it's an incredible increase in speed so suddenly now there are these two very powerful algorithms but just that niggling problem can you solve error correction is his theory right and in 1998 raela from from Canada actually did an experiment we took a trichloroethylene molecule he broke up the quantum information into different states brought them back to go again and showed that you could actually do quantum error correction and there the field of quantum computing was born now the fascinating thing about that is that's all just the theory of quantum so you can see it's taken them almost 100 years from some of the earliest concepts of quantum physics which is how the world behaves that they're very small whether it's a particle or whether it's a wave a hundred years before they come up with something where you could actually use it for computing in the meantime we've got the classical computing industry the technology is developing in parallel and of how we now have to go back 1940 vacuum tubes some of the first computers use vacuum tubes you can see the slides of them by the size of his hand and this is 1946 one of the world's first computers using vacuum tubes it's called ENIAC electronic numerical integrator and computer that's what it was called and there were over 19,000 of those vacuum tubes in their system they were very inefficient systems and if something went wrong it would take on average 20 minutes to a couple of hours to find the vacuum tube that didn't work you'd have to cycle through all those tubes you see it's the size of a room and so one of the big revolutions in the semiconductor industry came in 1947 where people realizes that vacuum tube which is a glass tube where you've got pump everything out to give a vacuum you've got anode and cathode new switch something between on and off States you could actually replace it with a tray sister and this here is a tiny sliver of germanium it's a very Keith Robinson experiment there's a glass slide there and that is a safety clip that goes up but you're basically passing current through the germanium transistor and they found that they could switch the current between on and off it's actually about the size of two centimeters in size so that was the world's first transistor made out of a semiconductor material that could go from conducting one States to insulating off state zero States that actually also won a Nobel price but it took them about several years almost a decade before they realized they could put lots of different components onto that chip so instead of one transistor they got the world's first integrated circuit by putting lots of components on one piece of germanium material and then shortly afterwards so now instead of having these big vacuum tubes with all kinds of different materials they can now put it in one slab monolithic materials where they caught it and they suddenly started putting more and more transistors on until 1981 they mailed the world's first personal computer an IBM computer now that industry is phenomenal and I've had the pleasure of going to the US and seeing these manufacturing plants and seeing what they're like and so nowadays if I look inside a computer I can actually take out the chip inside and that's how big it is so it's roughly the size you know a couple of inches square and the amazing thing about this chip is there are now 14 billion transistors on this chip so you imagine the size of the smallest transistor I'd have to break that up 14 billion times so you can imagine how small it would be it'd be smaller than anything I can see and what's happening with these chips now is they're building server farm so Facebook of companies like that are building these massive server farms with lots and lots of these computers to give you cloud computing in that massive parallel computing power this is one of Facebook's plants sitting up in Sweden so they generate so much power now that the air conditioning they need to keep it cool is quite costly so they're pushing them up to the Arctic Circle where it's nice and cold so they don't have to put air conditioning they just have to open the windows I think that's quite amazing and the amount of power that these consume can actually power up city in America a small city in America so that gives you an idea but behind those you know server farms that are now growing up all over the world you also have the semiconductor manufacturing plants for this is one that was built in South Korea it cost about fifteen point six billion dollars to make it actually is the size of four hundred soccer fields all connected together and for me the amazing thing about these is most of them are run by robots so when you go in there you do a process to take your silicon wafer all the way through to your transistors with those billions of transistors it's about five hundred step process they have pods that run along the ceiling with all the wafers stacked in them pods come down to a particular tool where they perform some kind of process to turn it into the transistor chip as the tools come down the wafer pod comes down a robotic arm comes out picks up a wafer loads into the tool lets it do the process comes back puts into the pot it goes up to the ceiling and along to the next tool it's absolutely phenomenal to see that process happening incredibly high yields and some of the people that earn some of the most money in the world are the people that troubleshoot those lines so their job is if it goes down it's literally millions of dollars to a day they have to get in there quick fix the tour to get the line back up and running so what's amazing for me is why she's got this quantum theory coming along you've got this massive change in technology happening internationally and these manufacturing plants now they're in the u.s. they're across Asia there is actually one in Australia called Solana not as big as the is the South Korean one but this is technology coming on it's expanding it's getting better our ability to see and control the world is getting better and better and so it comes along Moore's law so Gordon Moore who was the co-founder of Intel he looked at the smallest feature size on a silicon transistor as a function of time and he realized that you could put it literally and the linear graph so you've got the number of transistor components on the left-hand side and you've got your feature size of the bottom here and you can see as a function of time you can draw a line through it and this was quite amazing it was a phenomenological law it wasn't a real law but he said every year you can predict how small it's going to be in in fact what we need to do is as a community is to write down all the technical challenges along the way to make our transistors smaller every year and so came along something called the ITRs roadmap the international technology roadmap for semiconductors and it was opened up to the world all their technical challenges every year and people would put in trillions of dollars to solve those technical challenges so that every year you would get your faster computer or a latest iPhone whatever it might be so it was a self-fulfilling law but it went on for decades and so the reason why this is significant for me as you can see as you go from the left to the right you cross over from classical physics where everything behaves in the way you expect to quantum physics so if I have a tennis ball and I throw it at a wall it bounces off I know where to put my hand to catch it that's the world of classical physics I can write down equations to describe that if I make that tennis ball very very small and I throw it at the wall it behaves like a wave and it can actually toll through the wall and come out the other side and so that's the transition that's happening as devices are getting smaller smaller their quantum behavior starts to dominate so if we look at a typical transistor now this is what we call a 22 nanometer node it's the distance between chips on a on a silicon wafer it basically has a very thin fin in here it's like a shark fin that's why it's called a fin that is our silicon wafer that bright region is an oxide around it that's like an insulator and then we have this gate wrapped around its called a wraparound gate so if I apply a positive voltage to that gate I suck all the electrons up into the silicon fin and I turn the transistor on if I play negative voltage I puts all the electrons away and I turn the transistor off and that's my digital one and zero of digital information and there are 14 billion of those on that silicon chip so you get an idea what's happening now in our world is realizing one of the things Australia did back in 2000 was recognized that this law is being gained for decades so we're gonna buy into that we're gonna assume that it keeps going all the way to the top right-hand side of that screen and on the top right-hand side is when the smallest feature size is a single atom and so back in 2000 what we decided to do is rather than iterate along this line we're gonna jump to that endpoint and build a transistor out of a single atom back in 2000 there was no technology to do that but here's some example in our labs we've taken single atoms on a silicon surface and been able to manipulate them incredibly closely together now the fascinating thing is during all this time that the semiconductor industry is taking off quantum computing is starting to come along and for me as a scientist you know I spent my career moving around to different places I was actually working in England looking at what we call gallium arsenide transistors so the industry the silicon industry dominated all the research in silicon devices and as a consequence researchers at universities were looking at new materials materials that might be better in the future and gallium arsenide was always another semiconductor was always predicted to be the material of the future and so as in Cambridge looking at these devices realizing there are much faster but they're much more expensive and then quantum computing came out and the challenge was if you want to build a quantum computer what's the best material to build it in now gallium arsenide at the time was fast but it's got gallium atoms and Scot arsenic atoms it's got different isotopes and to build a computer in that was actually quite complicated and so what's happening is silicon is dominated by the industry and all the researchers in universities start looking at what they have and adapting there and what Australia did that was quite unique was it said we're gonna look at the theory that says what's the best way to build it and actually the theory says ironically if silicon is a really good material to build a quantum computer in and that's really where Australia got into the race very uniquely at a time when most people were not looking at silicon we jumped in and we said we're going to develop a technology to build single apps and devices to see if we can encode information what's a single item device I've talked about that chip having 14 billion transistors you imagine you chop it up 14 billion times it's beyond the point at which you can see so in order to be able to build devices we've got to have tools that allow us to see what atoms look like and to just give you a sense of microscopes you know most people will be aware of a light microscope where you literally pass light through a very thin sample and if you look at an onion skin you can see the scale bar there about 0.1 millimeter that's much you can see it's difficult to see with the eye but under a light microscope it bends as you can see it if I take that same onion skin and I put it in an electron microscope here I've got higher energies shorter wavelengths I can actually things much more clearly so I can see the outside of the wall of the cell and the nucleus in the middle if I take a sliver of hair and I put it in the microscope it's about 50 microns on average size so it's been point oh five millimeter you could all see your hair if you pull out your hair you can see it now imagine the transistors that we're making we're going down now and using a different kind of microscope called a scanning tunneling microscope this is a microscope you can see it's a large piece of stainless steel we pump out all the air in the middle so it's a vacuum system and we use a very fine needle to actually measure the atoms on that device and here is a silicon surface so you can see rows of silicon atoms the bright features or one atomic blue and you can see the atoms of perpendicular on the layer below that's the stacking crystal planes of the silicon crystal and if i zoom in I can see individual atoms so this was a technology developed in the 1980s it also won a Nobel Prize but those are my individual silicon atoms but I can see on the surface and I'll describe how that microscope works in a minute but it's basically 50 thousand times thinner than a width of a human hair so I do want you all to look out here right now it's good pick out your hair hold it up and if you hold it up and look at it imagine chopping that up fifty thousand times it's in tiny it's incredibly small you just cannot see it with the eye but with these microscopes you really can start to see individual atoms so the question is why would we go there's these theoretical algorithms that say we can do things a certain way but how do quantum computers work what's the difference so now we're just going to compare classical to quantum so in a classical computer anyone that's written code will know you go from one line to another so you can tell you have to work through it and go very very fast but you've got to go one line so now they can't miss it out of the whole things falls apart so if I'd written a telephone number in a piece of paper and asked whose number was in a classical computer with search through the directory if I wanted to go faster I'd split a directory in two and have two computers working if I wanted to go faster side split into three and that's the kind of basis of power of computing in the classical world in the quantum world however we check many possibilities at the same time and that's the thing that people don't like so just try and imagine how can you and this is where my two equations come in imagine now I'm in the quantum world and I'm an electron on an atom have you put me in a magnetic field at low temperature I'm like a little bar magnet you can imagine me sitting in the middle of the earth I can either be pointing to the North Pole of my little bar magnet or I can be pointing to the South Pole but it's my digital one and zero of information but in the quantum world I can actually point anywhere on the surface of the earth and when I write that down here's the first equation mathematically this what's called superposition I'm in the combination of some fraction of the Upstate and some fraction of the downstate at the same time and to describe now my bit in the quantum world is called a quantum bit or a cubit to describe my qubit I need two classical bits of information anywhere alpha zero and my alpha one now something amazing happens when I bring two quantum bits and I get into salt together so two qubits I now have something called entanglement and I now have four different states I can have my down-down States up-up States up-down or down-up States and to describe that I form one entangled state and there are now four classical bits of information to describe it there's my our four zero alpha 1 alpha 2 and alpha 3 now the important thing here is if I do any operation on that state I do it on all the individual states at the same time that's where the parallel approach comes from but the other thing is every time I add a quantum bit I'm doubling the amount of information that it contains and so by the time I get to 30 quantum bits it's more powerful than the world's most powerful supercomputer and that's the race at the moment to get to what we call quantum supremacy where classwork what quantum computer can outperform a classical view and if I could get to 300 cubits it's be predicted that's more than all the computers in the world connected together so that's the race now 300 or 30 or whatever 100 quantum bits will outperform 14 billion classical bits so how well quantum computing changed the world now this is obviously a new field we know there's too powerful guns I've already talked about but there are other ones there are optimization algorithms what people are getting into this we can't see the future but we can start to predict some areas where quantum physics will come in and so the United Parcel Service in the US has recognized if they can shorten the delivery distance of each of their drivers by just one mile a day they would actually save the company fifty million dollars a year so they're very keen to look at how to optimize the routes optimizing the way that workforces are organizing all those kind of optimization problems there's machine learning on Big Data obviously nowadays we're taking huge amounts of data if we're looking at self-driving cars they've got a huge amount of information that's coming through they have to sort through quickly is that a pedestrian is it a tree and so quantum computing is predicted to be very powerful for machine learning whether it's predictive and accurate weather forecasting huge number of applications in that space then there's quantum simulation and so one of the first things people think are going to come about is a process called the harbor Bosh process which turns nitrogen from nitrogen gas into nitrogen that you can use for fertilizer it's a high energy expensive process it takes huge amounts of the world's energy and cost and people reckon if you can find a better catalyst you'd be able to solve that much better using quantum simulation so drug design is another area looking at sensors on airplanes for aircraft design huge numbers of areas of quantum simulation and then finally that prime number factorization I talked about before so that kind of code breaking application there are over 50 different quantum albums ten years ago everyone talked about - there are now 50 and it's growing and what's fascinating for me is watching this field evolve is there's huge numbers of software engineers and algorithm developers even before the hardware has been built quite amazing everyone's waiting for that hardware now this is a very busy slide and this is just to talk about the different ways you can build a quantum computer I'm going to highlight three areas the smaller your physical system the longer it holds the quantum state the larger it is the more interact with its environment and so you can see here we have essentially atoms molecules and ions of very small systems we have electron and nuclear spins on atoms and on the right hand side we have what we call superconducting qubits these are loops of material where you pass a current and you create a magnetic flux now one of the key things you can see is all these small atoms they're tiny and as whence the coherence time how long can they hold that quantum state is long and if you look on the right-hand side you can see for the sleeping 13 qubits because they're physically large that coherence time is short but it's not that that matters there's another thing that matters how fast can you operate the qubit we've got a longer hearings time and a very fast operation time that ratio is the biggest and it's that ratio that we're really keen on the higher that number the better the system is likely to be and the more qubits you can build more powerful computer and so you can see for electron nuclear spins in solids there are some of the highest ratios and so that's really why you know you see now lots of different people building different qubit systems superconducting qubits they're coming at first-to-market they're very large they actually made with technology that was back in the 1990's first atomic scale systems are much smaller they interact less with the environment and hopefully they'll produce larger scale quantum computers so there are now five what I would say leading contenders and the reason I've chosen these five is because those are the five that actually have companies set up in their space so you can see silicon spins superconducting qubits iron trap some of the first qubits diamond vacancies and topological qubits and they're those metrics up there how long can it last what's the success rate how accurately can you operate it and how many qubits are up there that they've actually demonstrated in town one so you can see we're right at the beginning of this field we're still less than 50 cubits yeah we're all racing to get to that point we can prove that quantum out performs classical each one of them has positive in negatives I won't go through them all but there's always nothing comes in life for free but what's fascinating is you look at the companies on the bottom the number of companies is growing rapidly so again go back 10 years there'll be one quantum computing company a company called D way from Canada now there are probably about ten Hardware companies there probably about thirty software software companies or software / consultancy companies and it's really growing incredibly rapidly almost every week you hear of a new company coming up in this space it really is a race so let's just go back to those semiconductors I talked before about the industry captured silicon and so when quantum computing came out most people at universities that had the ability to look at quantum states where it's which operate at low temperature where can't get a mastitis as soon as the field came out in the 1990s I like this builds a qubit in gallium arsenide and it took them a few years before they could get down to a device where they have one electron that's your quantum bit or qubit at the same time people working in silicon germanium structures another crystalline material another University of the search area they took a few years to get down but the single atom qubits had to develop the whole technology of how to put a single atom in place so it took slightly longer and it's that journey that I want to take you now as to how we build those qubits so here was the first concept Bruce came back in 1998 said if you could build it in silicon you can encode information on that single atom this is the kind of unit cell of what the quantum computer look white so you can see we have phosphorus atoms in silicon phosphorus has one extra electron compared to silicon and we're going to encode information on that extra electron we're going to cool it down to low temperature that stops all the vibrations from the lattice affecting our quantum state and we're going to put it in a magnetic field so that we get this spin up and spin down or we can rotate the spin on that sphere now the advantage of silicon is it's almost like putting your quantum bit into a vacuum all the atoms around it in silicon all the electrons in the Sigma's are used to bond to each other so they essentially neuter out so the only electron spin is that extra one you've put on the phosphorous atom they have the highest ratio of how long it lasts the operation time it's in a material that unit that the industry has for 50 years purified and made better and figured out how to manufacture and it has very low noise so because it's in that nice crystalline environment that qubits in there and it's nice and safe so that was that was Bruce's idea back in 1998 we're now trying to build that in Australia and this is the kind of technique we're using instead of having that kind of three-dimensional diagram on the right-hand side and on the left-hand side well we've got meth and gates on the surface like that transistor I showed you before controlling the wave functions of atoms beneath the surface we're actually going to put more on one atomic plane we're going to get rid of as many variables as we can and we can end up with a device where there's only two atoms phosphorus and silicon to make it as simple as we can to get rid of all the things that we can't control now the thing that Bruce originally said is these voltages on these gates we could use those to control the wave function Bo so every qubit has a gate and by putting a voltage on that we can move the electron away from where the nucleus spin of the phosphorus is and therefore we can chew each qubit individually with a gate voltage we have another gate called that J gate sits between them we can put a voltage on there and get the two wave functions to talk to each other and in that way we can create entanglement so this is the kind of operation of the qubit that he originally envisaged but what we're going to do is we're going to put more and one atomic plane so those red atoms or qubits those blue atoms are our leads to it and we're going to try and build this architecture with just those two atoms now we talked about scanning tunneling microscope how does actually work so now we want to get to the point where we can actually show how we can see atoms and how we can manipulate them and that microscope is essentially a very fine methyl tip like a needle that you bring down to the surface of your material and at the end of the tip this red tip here there's a single atom and when it gets close enough electrons is in the ultra high vacuum system the electrons will tunnel through the tip through the vacuum onto the sample surface and you'll get a current flame that's called a tunneling cone and if we keep that current constant and we move the tip over it will deflect in height as it goes over the atoms so we can literally move it across the surface and pick out the topographic height of the atoms on the surface so raster scan it like a television screen and that's how we image those individual atoms now the amazing thing was technology developed in the 1980s and 1990s IBM said actually we put certain methyl atoms on a metal surface we can come down with that tip and if we put a voltage on there we could pick up and act and move it along and pass it off so we can actually form the world's smallest logo which they did IBM out of individual atoms and it was really that concept of using that tip to move atoms around that made people think maybe we could apply this to semiconductors and maybe we can make devices with single-item precision now there's a big difference here in the semiconductor we already talked about all those bonds are strong you can't pick up an atom because they're actually bound into the substrate so we have to come up with another idea and that's really what we've developed here over the last 10 fifteen years we're gonna use that microscope to manipulate atoms but we're gonna do by making a mask now the key thing is we can only see the atoms in the microscope once you take it out you can't see anything so if I took a chip put it at a min took it out again it would look exactly the same so the first thing we do is we have to make edged holes in the surface and that's the metal tip we're bringing down there that helps us find where we're putting in the atoms we then put down a layer of hydrogen on top of the silicon surface and what that does is it forms an atomic scale mask and when we come along with that STM tip we can remove hydrogen atoms exposing this silicon underneath and that is very very bright up here that's where the silicon is exposed we now want to bring our phosphorus atoms in we use phosphine gas and it will only stick where the hydrogen is removed and it won't stick to the hydrogen surface we then heat it up we find the phosphorous likes to go in and kick silicon out so you can see the phosphor is going in here we then take it to another chamber we grow silicon on top to encapsulator we then come back with our estions and we can image and see that the atoms are still there so we make a certain pattern even though it's encapsulated with silicon we can find out where the atoms are sitting and then we use those markers and we take it out of the microscope to go through to a conventional clean room like an Intel clean room to put down contacts to the Buried device so that's the process that we developed and when we put that out about a decade ago back in 2000 people were quick to say none of those stages has been realized and the chances of getting all through to the end of those stage and everyone working is pretty slim so good luck to yours is see how you go and that was really a challenge for us and we actually loved that change because every time we hit one of those milestones it was a great win for our team not to do that we had to bring together two different technologies we had to bring together a microscope that allows you to image atoms and what we call a crystal growth system that allows you to grow atoms and they were very different technologies one had lots of pumps vibrating away and the other one you're trying to manipulate atoms so our first system we designed it was a big risk of three and a half billion dollars was these two technologies in different rooms connected together and we had if this big chunk of concrete here 3 tons of concrete weighing it down in the middle so the vibrations didn't get it was something that took three and a half years to different companies working with them overseas building the lab to make it it took about a year and a half before it arrived no one knew that was gonna work and it actually worked out attractive six better than we designed it for so that allows us to build some of our first devices and what I'm going to show you now is a movie about how we made the first single atom transistor so I've already talked through this process we take a silicon substrate we put the edge registration markers in load it into our ultra-high vacuum system terminate the surface with hydrogen so it forms an atomic scale mask we only want to get one phosphorous in now so we open up a hole with our tip that is exactly six hydrogen atoms bigger we're now going to bring in the phosphine gas the phosphine will only stick with the silicones exposed and we can force three phosphine fragments into that hole we do a controlled chemical reaction we heat it up a pH two likes to grab a hydrogen and come off and dissociate get phosphine gas it allows another pH to dissociate to pH another pH two grabs the hydrogen off it goes and our phosphorous atom now a little bit more heat goes in and kicks the silicon out you can actually see the whole process in the microscope we know our phosphorus has gone in because that ejected silicon atom is there we now take it to either a chain when we encapsulate the silicon to give it a nice protective environment to protect our kuia but the interesting thing is that we also want to be able to address our atoms and we actually use the same process to make conducting leads out of phosphorus doped silicon and we can patent them with Sutton anomie to precision to where we put that Aten once we've encapsulated we take it out of ultra high vacuum system through to a cleanroom and we put down metal contacts using those registration markets so that's how we make our single asome transistor that's what the lithography looks like so you can see our little hole there these are right bright regions where the silicon is removed and if I step back a little bit and look at our device under the microscope that's what it looks like so you can see that there are these little wavy bits these are their terraces as step terraces of the silicon surface the bright regions are where the hydrogen is removed we have a source and a drain and were going to pass a current through that atom to try and turn it on and off and we use these two gate voltages to move the energy levels of the atom up and down so we can actually measure what we call its spectrum I'm going to zoom in there and there those are ejected silicon atoms so the exciting thing for us is we saw that picture before we had to finish making in the device we knew the atom was there but we didn't know it was going to work and then when you measure it you're hoping to get a fingerprint of what that atom looks like and that fingerprint like every individual is unique to buy an atom so let's just imagine what we have we have a little potential well we've got a phosphorous atom with a nuclear spin a little potential well and electrons can fall in that like a bucket now because it's small it's quantized this goes back to quantum physics and they're actually two different energy levels where we can take electrons so we can dive down at the bottom here there's no electrons in the phosphorous we call it ionized in the middle region here it's called the D not the state we put one election on there and we can just about load a second electron and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my source and drain to align the energy levels it's a pass current through and when the energy levels are line an electron can hop onto the atom and move across the other side I can get current through the device and then I'm gonna change the gate voltage and move their energy level up until they get to the next energy level and now an electron will move through so I'm expecting to see two peaks in the current as I change the gate voltage and that's exactly what we saw there's the current as a function of the gate voltage you get those two little peaks and eventually when their green line crosses over above all the electrons go and the whole thing conducts and that's where it goes rushing off on the right hand side so that's what we're expecting and the great thing we can do with our devices we can move all the energy levels around so we can get the electrons to switch around within the device and typically what we do when we do that is we get this beautiful spectra that tell you hey I'm a phosphorus atom we can measure what we call the charging energy and that energy is basically from the measurement 47 mini electron volts and that matches beautifully with optical measurements that were done between those two energy levels back in the 1980s so this really says measure make me see that I'm there measure my energy spectra and I will tell you whether I'm a phosphorus atom or an arsenic atom or how many phosphorous atoms I am so that was really the first single lesson transistor we did actually get beginners book of records for doing now the next question I've got about three or four devices I'm going to go through with you they get technically harder so hang in with me the next one is a wire so we want to bring currents in to control the at and how thin can we make those wires so here we've made it one point seven nanometers wide and we're going to measure the resistivity and normally when you make a wire thinner and thinner and thinner there are less paths for the electrons to go and the resistance shoots up an industry was really struggling this is the picture of our thin wire and what happens when we put the phosphorous in neck they crowd together really closely but industry was struggling because they looked at the resistivity of the wires as a function of their diameter and as they made them thinner and thinner you see these black and gray lines the resistivity would start shooting up and so you imagine they've got all these transistors they're packing together they want to get information into there 14 billion transistors but as they make their wires dinner they become very resistive and some what we found is using this technique best technique phosphine is a very small molecule can pack it closely together and as a consequence these are some red stars we found that we could go all the way down to the atomic scale and keep this very low resistivity it's totally unpredicted now the reason why I'm going to try to explain imagine you're a phosphorus atom and you've got an electron the electron this wave and it extends out through space and if you put another phosphorous atom very close to me its wave will overlap with my wave and eventually we're close enough together all the waves will overlap and I'll be able to go through with no resistance a lot of the industry devices the folk the atoms are far enough away that the wave didn't overlap so I had to hop through them and my resistance would be higher so by bringing these close together I make these very very conducting wires and again what's happened now as industries adapt to some of these techniques in their fabrication processes now we're going to go through two more devices imagine now on said I'm a dot I'm a bucket of electrons and I've got my source and drain when I align them I can get electrons hop on and off and I get these peaks in current and as I showed before as I move my source and drain I get a fingerprint of what that dot looks like this dot is vital for us because it's a sensor that allows us to measure the spin of the electron on the atoms some of our first devices we have 4,000 phosphorous atoms we dropped it down to 7 phosphorous atoms and if we look at the spectra it looks kind of similar but it's different you can see that the size of these what we call diamonds changes if I go all the way down to a single phosphorus atom now I start to see just those three charge states so every device we make has a unique spectrum we use that spectra deliberately to design our computer so now what I'm going to do is bring the end this is the last device I'm going to go through last couple of devices here's my device with my bucket of electrons my single electron transistor over here and I'm gonna pass the current through this and there's my phosphorus atom and I'm going to try and determine what's the spin of the electron on that phosphorus atom that's the whole goal because what I want to do is initialize information and read information from that single electron on that phosphorous atom so I'm going to pass the current through here as a function of these two gate biases and what you see these bright features going down as current passes through the device when the energy level of this aligns with the phosphorous set and I get these breaks here and again by measuring all the voltages on this device I can show that the distance between these two breaks is the distance here between our phosphorous atoms that I showed you before again proving it's a phosphorus atom with our spins up and spins down and I'm gonna zoom into one of these regions here when electrons pass through here and I align this energy up electron will hop on here and I will come off the conduction peak and there'll be a break and that's how I'm gonna figure out whether it's a spin up or spin down electron so I'm gonna zoom in to that region and again just applying voltages to my gate I'm gonna do what we call a four level of pause sequence in the first level I've got my spin up and spin down of the electrons on the phosphorus atom and I've got my bucket of electrons sitting in the in the island of that single electron transistor and I'm gonna pulse it down to my load and electron onto the phosphorous now if it's a spin up you'll be sitting in that top energy level and I find that I come off resonance of my CT so the current drops down I go to the readout regime and that electrons spin because it's higher in energy can move over so another electron will load back down and what I see is this beautiful peaking current so what I'm doing now I put an atom in place from the electron spin I bore a center though patterned right nearer and I can now determine whether that spin is up or down I can move the energy levels back up so the electrons come back up and I go back onto resonance and we will do this many many thousands of times we're now able to measure a single spin on a single atom by bringing this sense in thereby and we can do it with very high fidelity the final thing we need to do is to actually control the rotations of these atoms and the way we do this is a results from my colleagues and Romero and Roger and David Jemison they've put a thin wire on the surface and when they pass a current through this wire they create a local oscillating magnetic field and that allows my qubit now to rotate around that sphere so now I've got control of my spin like a read it in and out and I can rotate it around the sphere and I can do that for the electron or the nucleus spin and these are the record coherence times that we predicted so for silicon qubits these go here in terms of seconds which are orders of magnitude higher than supermoon acting qubits and the Fidelity's are much much higher so it's very exciting for us we found that sticking with silicon despite all the technical challenges ten years of designing devices we've actually shown that the qubits are really worthwhile and so what we're on a mission now is to get to what we call a ten qubit quantum integrated circuit so it's replicating the transistor story from the classical computing and we want to do that within the next decade and so I've shown you a hundred years of theory you know ten years of developing the technology and now wham over the last five to ten years we've had a phenomenal series of results 2012 our first single atom transistor we can make a wire that's very thin we can make these sensors that we bring close to measure a single electron we can actually get two qubits to talk to each other we can actually measure the wave function directly so we can actually see the wave function beneath the crystal so we know how to design it from knowing where they are we can independently initialize and read them out even though they're very close together we can show that we get correlations between the spin we flip one the other one flips back on and we've shown that we can individually address two qubits even though they're less than 10 nanometers apart we can flip this one without touching this one but ultimately we've got to design a whole computer so Tinky which is great but we've got to get to a big computer and so we've also been looking at how we're going to make a full scale computer using this technology and these are just some slides here whole computer has to address lots of qubits at the same time in in parallel and so you have to go instead of this line of cuba's you have to go to a two dimensional array and one of the challenges there is how do you get all the contacts into those devices and this is true of any qubit architecture how do you they're so small and close together how do you get in tooth relates them and so the way we're going is to go three dimensional so we can pattern wires on one plane running in one direction grow silicon pattern our qubits and those little reservoirs to read them in another plant grow more silicon and then pattern wires that run perpendicular to the first plane and supply them voltages to two different ways we can individually address the qubits it's a very exciting time it's a unique technology to be able to go 3d and just as a bit of fun Yaris is one of the people working on this projects is patent here a thousand and twenty four cubits and shown how well we can align them with our STM so this was done you know without a huge amount of work but it shows that we've got technology there that will allow us to extend to this 3d architecture so now I'm going to change a little bit so this is the technology that we've developed what I've shown you is essentially there are three pillars of success one is those concepts an idea they take about a hundred years to germinate to the point you can realize them the second one is the technology has to come along at the same time and what you'll find is we need three sets of labs in order to be able to design build and test these devices the first lab is a cleanroom we want to make devices they're very small we have to wear suits so that we don't get dust on our devices the light is yellow so we don't have ultraviolet like exposing our devices and typically it takes you know six months or so to learn the technology of making contacts to are very small devices and when it works you feel pretty good the second one that Adam lab I've talked about how to get the single item in there we need to bring together those two technologies at at a manipulation and crystal growth and that's taken us about a decade to develop and then the final lab is the happy lab that's where the actual chip operates you have to cool it down to very low temperatures these are called dilution fridges they have a mixture of helium 3 and helium 4 they almost get to the absolute zero temperature and then we've got lots of electronics that go down to these very small fast signals to control these single electrons on these single atoms in our devices the amazing thing is you've got to have all three within one location so you can go round around that loop fast and one of the exciting things about our technology is we can do that we can design build and test in one week a particular design of our qubit we're very excited about that we're building lots of fridges so we can design lots of designs and actually build the prototypes as fast as we can and then the final pillar which is not to be underestimated is what I call the implementers those are the people those are the people that really make it work and this comes back to a whole group of people starting back in 2000 the original founders of the center this is after we had finished our interview we thought we did pretty well looking very happy with ourselves we've got the theorist Bruce came that came up with the original idea we've got our theorists and our experimentalist in Melbourne since David Jamison Lloyd hollenberg and there is the forest the Ganga for here at the University of New South Wales as spend rock and drama alone myself and Andrew Durant who are really pushing that technology for is you also need funders so we've been very fortunate to have funding from the Australian Research Council and one of the things I emphasize at the beginning but this training Research Council came up with two fantastic schemes research fellowships to allow people leadership at a young age and centers of excellence that allowed Australians to work on big ambitious projects collaboratively in Australia and that has really put Australia on the world stage we also get funding from the US Army and the semiconductor Research Corporation that overlooks the semiconductor roadmap we get funding from Telstra and CBA's so our corporate partners have started to come in but then also you need visionary visionary vice chancellors says fred Hilmer and he and jacobs both have got behind this and recognized that to support this research in the universities you have to build the facilities to make it happen and support the researchers you've got the advisors we've got a fantastic advisory board people from across the industry and government on the top right inside the we've got you know the Vice Chancellors UTS nearby we've got someone from the CBA we've got Doug Hilux from the cybersecurity growth centre we've got Alex and then ski the chief defense scientists pdh corporate lawyer Stephen Menzies in the audience a whole group of people with different expertise that really help us to push this technology and give us links to important people like government and to the public you need someone that really knows how to command and control people so tony reciters our chief operations officer he was a captain of HMS in Melbourne when we were looking at someone to run this centre we wanted someone that knew command and control we knew someone that would understand how to get people to work collaborates you collaborated ly together he's been fantastic we've got people that do off-planet savita's been with us for a long time Savita and Ezra working in our finite systems and then we've got our technical people watching Holman runs the labs fantastic keeps more running on a daily basis we've just hired Chris George to work in the cleans and here he's showing were these young children how things work and then we've got Matt Boland that runs the NFF and he swears to me that he's smiling in that photograph so cell-free from winning the cleaner of the children watching what he's up to there's a huge group of people over 200 working on this project and the thing that bringing it back to the beginning that amazes me is the community of people you need here's about half of my research team if you look at this we've got people from Germany New Zealand America China Poland Holland that'll make sure I remember the flags France England Russia Bangladesh Korea and of course a few Z's in there so it really is a community of people across the world all of us with different ideas different expertise different backgrounds and that is absolutely crucial for a search looking for words though I wanted to get you to look at some of these pictures and one of the things that you will notice in these pictures is the number of computers that are in there we need computers that run the experiments we need computer that take the data we need computers all the way through to model our systems and understand what we're getting at the end of the day we need a lot of maths a lot of Statistics a lot of coding so going forwards this quantum revolution is hitting the world internationally and we really need to make sure our young people are skilled up and ready for this how long is it going to take we can look now at how long it took for the classical industry to come along 1947 the first transistor took about a decade before got the first integrated circuit and then another five years before we got commercial products and we can plot that for the transistor in this laptop and so that basically tells you that from the first transistor through it's about 15 years and our first transistor was 2012 that's the kind of milestones that we're heading for but internationally the race is hotting up you can see all over the world huge amounts of funding me too this area the European Union IBM's putting money in China has actually established a whole university dedicated to quantum science the Dutch the danish the singapore's it's actually becoming a national sport to get into quantum computing and then there's companies you can see US companies coming in to superconducting qubits and US labs coming into silicon so they're National Labs it's a very exciting time Australia is incredibly well placed we have six centers of excellence in quantum physics across the country it is an opportunity for us to be bold to take leadership in this area we've got a trained workforce and we need to make sure that our future generations come through and take advantage of that thank you [Applause] [Applause] okay one more thing to say so just just very briefly we did have an open day very recently where we opened up we bought school children through and it was absolutely phenomenal to get into showing them our labs and this really went back to the time where I went to the US and saw these semiconductor manufacturing plants our dream was to bring these guys in so they could see what we get up to and I have to say it's been the best day of my year so I'll leave it with her thank you now we are very fortunate to have a few moments to take some questions from the audience for Michelle and you know in line with the spirit of the week National Science Week engaging and inspiring Australians with scientists I want to encourage those questions I also want to point out that Michelle has to get to a Katy Perry concert so we haven't actually got a whole lot of time and and also I would like to take at least the first three questions from younger members of the audience potentially students of the University or students of high schools maybe someone who visited Michelle's lab this week please if you have a question there are microphones over on this side one and over on this side too so stand up and and take the floor and we have a first question and hello hi I've actually been to your open day and there has been questions since I've been there so in the demonstration showed us you said that you need to have the quantum computing operating in temperature that's absolutely near absolute zero yeah so how was you so if it works it mass-produced will become say personalized computer how would you attack with that problem so that's a great question the reason why that's great is because it will manage the expectations so if you look at the first computers they were those massive servers it took a long time for the technology to develop before you could actually get one on your desk it's the same with quantum computing so at the beginning we don't envisage that people are going to happen on their desks they do need very low temperatures and what's fascinating for me is if you look at the way that technology is evolving to operate those quantum computers every year we're designing the chip every year those manufacturers of those dilution fridges that allow you to make them cold I'm making them more compact smaller and working better and so as time evolves 50 years from now who knows but right now we're not planning that everyone has them on their desk so they are bespoke computers only certain type of calculations they can do sorry so you're just saying if you were to use them it can't you can't have a way of having quantum computers without having that temperature like that moment at the moment yep everyone's looking at computers that work at very low temperature whether they're sipping duck to your semiconducting I talked a bit about diamond diamond works at room temperature but it's very hard to manufacture so the moment everyone envisages that these quantum server farms and literally going to be low temperature systems and you've got to have that controlled environment enabled we always be able to run it and so I think one of the one of the challenges is other problems valuable enough that you would put up with those low temperatures and I think they are I will take a question from over here thank I so I'm a first year physics student and I thought there's that presented as was really interesting I was wondering what can I do what can my peers do to get involved and hopefully help you you know down the line you should definitely email us so one of the things that we have done over the years is we've taken both my school students and undergraduates from first year that's come and do work experience with us so we have a big team we need lots of people with coding experience the more people get involved with this the longer they stay and they tend to come all the way through it so yeah send us an email okay very amazing that from like only like 56 years ago we in vacuum tubes are about this big but this big and now we have bits bus phones that are like 100,000 times more powerful I'm optimistic that the rate of development from like vacuum tubes to supercomputers to photocopying will be accelerating because it kind of sits in a exponential curve like getting faster and faster and faster exponentially are you optimistic that Oh be that Wonka video comes to know then later so yeah the reality is you know humans are fantastic at developing technology if you said 50 years ago that we were going to design devices out of single atoms people to laughed at you and so you know technology is rapidly evolving and hopefully what I've given you a sense of the ideas take a long time to germinate well once technology gets in there the semiconductor industry is phenomenal the quantum community at the moment is developing ways of using single photons or by its single spins and I it's you know every year new technology comes out that allows us to understand that world better and the irony for me is we're actually using the atoms to help us build the fauna computer so by making the systems we can model them and from the models we can actually help build the next generation of computers so you know we're in a different paradigm technology's moving fast and yeah it's very exciting thank you hey I was just wondering what's the yield of these devices that are being manufactured compared to other approaches and what are the biggest challenges in making them yes a you you were very difficult to find out yes so one of the things that we tried to do with our technique was to be able to make the same device twice so you know one of my experiences is working in the UK is we were making gallium arsenide transistors if we tried to make the same quantum device twice it was very hard and we spent a lot of time so what we thought with this technique is getting rid of all the things that change all the variables we have to worry about have two atoms keep the temperature low keep the magnetic fields low high yields very high as a consequence at the moment it all depends on how quickly you can scale how quickly you can design and test will be the ones that will get to building a large-scale computer fast enough and that's really the game is to have lots of low temperature systems build and test as fast as you can and make sure you can make the same thing twice it's very hard in the pond so we take a second question here sorry no further one hi I was just wondering why is it easier to build with a single electron than with a single atom what why is it easy to build a transistor with a single electron than with a single atom because the single electron came first so the electron sits on the atom yeah so some you've I've got you've got different ways of make it you can either try and catch an electron and a bigger device which means you've got to engineer it to capture an electron that's actually quite hard or you can just put an atom there and it gives you that electron for free so the atom and the electron go together put the atom in place you get the electron thank you Hey and so you talked about the quantum generation and it sounds brilliant and you also talked about having to train a quantum science or a scientist to work at your facility for six months so there's definitely a large educational overhead for developing this generation have you is there a plan to streamline this education yeah so look I think across across every country at the moment they're looking at how do they train more people in this space so we certainly need more people coming through and I guess one of the things that I've learned is that in this space you need people with deep knowledge so it's not a question of just learning something very quickly and picking it up you have to be in the field for a period of time and so what you're starting to see across every country now they're coming out with quantum degrees they're bringing it up yeah I transferred a whole university dedicated it but getting people trained in this space is going to take a different way of thinking it's certainly something everyone's look here and there is a new Sydney quantum entrepreneurship Academy yeah quantum Academy just forming with support from the state government precisely to train people in the area but also to train the ecosystem of quantum entrepreneurs businesspeople developers engineers etc that need to be in place to support quantum science and so that's exciting we'll take a question over here sorry I'm just I mean this is probably the broadest question but where would you see quantum physics being applied to a more biological or medical industry so that's it so in the in the field of quantum simulation so looking at drug design is an area that everyone's looking at the moment so you know to take a drug to market is a very expensive process classical computers can only model about 20 atoms so when you start to look at the interaction of a drug with the human body it's just too complex that's why we have to have these long and expensive drug testing facilities so with the quantum you know the hope is that we'll be able to understand how those molecules interact with the human body that's classic area in computing and biology that's kind of coming hi I'm a law student so I have limited science knowledge and the question I will I to ask it's about like when I think about computing and the information system the first thing come to my mind is the blockchain which is a new way that maybe the future computing we use to deliver informations and then I was wondering is this kind of new quantum computing will be kind of like provide a technical base for the devices to to be able to receive data at the same time like well in the future computing network yes a little bit so one of the things we do in our Center as well as doing computing which is doing you know fast processing we also do secure communication systems so you can actually use quantum states to pass information episodes securely if you send the quantum state down a fiber and somebody tries to hack into it it actually collapses the kind of state of the information is lost and so one of the long things in the futures have very fast computers quantum computers connecting with a secure quantum network and that's the area where it starts over like things like blockchain thank you thank you we'll take one final question over here and apologies to the people who haven't had an opportunity to ask oh yeah my question is actually kind of similar to the previous one so assuming that everything goes well and the quantum computer is made and anybody can access it how do we protect like passwords and for example like the bank our details so that that's exactly right so quantum quantum communication is the way to do it so the moment everything is sent and people can hack into it's erratically and in the classical world but in the quantum world the whole point is we asked the quantum state what it is it collapses so if you have a secure quantum key you can get the information but if you don't then the information collapses and no one else can hack in so that's this idea of a quantum Internet connecting communications and computing together is the way around it so quantum allows you to hack and it allowed you to protect at the same time thank you thank you so I'll end with one final question you are leading the development of one of the first will the first Australian quantum computing company and you also have incredible support through the University can you explain why you need the company in this space what's it going to do yeah so one of the things I realized you know probably about 5-10 years ago as Australia is leaving this research field and it can actually build and develop the devices here and I suddenly rise if we're leading in the field and we can build it here and it's something that's you know gonna be very useful for many industries 40% of Australian industry is predicted to be impacted we want to build the company to build it and then the question is if you build a company typically in Australia we're not well known for doing that well and so we looked at how can you make it work in the Australian context we're very collaborative we're very competitive that's what Australia's great at the same time but to build a company you've got to keep it close to the research it's another 10 years a way of developing the fundamental research to make that computer work so let's build a company with the University Center of Excellence keep the powerhouse of war people coming through but give a prototype systems of a company with well-defined milestones and it's that you know it's fairly unique across the world that we've come to that realization that keeping the company with the University having industry investors is what will make it successful fantastic I think it will be very successful can you please join me today in thanking Australia you

Channel: UNSW

Views: 63,722

Rating: 4.8320613 out of 5

Keywords: UNSW Sydney, UNSW Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. University, unsw, university

Id: FnPp73F5cnE

Length: 69min 3sec (4143 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 13 2018