Lifeboat Foundation

Opening RemarksAugust 19, 2024

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Engineers have developed the world’s first quantum microprocessor chip for simulating large and complex molecular structures.

The full-fledged development of qudits in superconducting circuits is hindered by limited interaction toolkit and stringent requirements on frequencies and anharmonicities. Here, the authors propose and demonstrate an alternative scheme to perform multi-qudit gates in transmon-based devices, which is based on Raman-assisted two-photon interactions.

Quantum computers have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the world around us—and teach us how to manipulate it. The technology could enable the rapid design and development of life-saving drugs, simulate superconducting materials that would revolutionize technology and clean energy, and even offer insight into the underlying structure of space and time. Like the qubits that sit in superposition at the heart of quantum computers, the possibilities seem endless.

“Right now, you will find people who see quantum computing as a panacea,” says Susanne Yelin, a professor of physics in residence at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “I am not one of them. But quantum computing could help us better understand fundamental physics, such as problems in condensed matter or particle physics. It could also advance quantum chemistry [which uses quantum physics to understand chemical systems]—and with it, better development of drugs and materials.”

At the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Harvard Griffin GSAS), PhD physics students Maddie Cain, on whose dissertation committee Yelin sits, and Dolev Bluvstein are working to make the promise of quantum computing a reality. In the laboratory of Professor Mikhail Lukin, Cain and Bluvstein push the boundaries of science, advancing the prospects of transformative applications that could reshape our world.

Dark states are quantum states in which a system does not interact with external fields, such as light (i.e., photons) or electromagnetic fields. These states, which generally occur due to interferences between the pathways through which a system interacts with an external field, are undetectable using spectroscopic techniques.

Many quantum devices, from quantum sensors to quantum computers, use ions or charged atoms trapped with electric and magnetic fields as a hardware platform to process information.

Integrated photonic circuits operating at room temperature combined with optical nonlinear effects could revolutionize both classical and quantum signal processing. Scientists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, in collaboration with other institutions from Poland as well as Italy, Iceland, and Australia, have demonstrated the creation of perovskite crystals with predefined shapes that can serve in nonlinear photonics as waveguides, couplers, splitters, and modulators.

Just a few years ago, researchers discovered that changing the angle between two layers of graphene, an atom-thick sheet of carbon, also changed the material’s electronic and optical properties. They then learned that a “twist” of 1.1 degrees—dubbed the “magic” angle—could transform this metallic material into an insulator or a superconductor, a finding that ignited excitement about a possible pathway to new quantum technologies.