For my own students that are hard at work
in the research laboratory,
they can see something that is totally contrary
to what they've observed before.
That was amazing 'cause it's very rare
that you learn something as crazy as quantum mechanics
and then learn that it can be used for new technologies.
Education is an important foundation
for helping advance a new field.
Especially in science and technology.
Major universities will play a key role
in developing the next generation of quantum programmers,
scientists, engineers and researchers.
A great place to learn about how universities
are advancing quantum knowledge
is the University of Washington,
one of our partners in the Northwest Quantum Nexus
and home of the QuantumX initiative.
I'm Krysta Svore, General Manager of Quantum Systems
and Software at Microsoft.
And today I'm meeting with Professor Kai-Mei Fu,
an experimental physics researcher and professor
focusing on advancing quantum technologies.
Kai-Mei, thank you for speaking with me today
about quantum information science.
Would you tell me a little bit about your role here
at the University of Washington.
I'm a professor in the physics department
and the electrical and computer engineering department.
I teach from first year physics
all the way to graduate level courses
in quantum information,
but then I also run a laboratory developing hardware
for quantum information science.
This is science and technology
where you utilize quantum mechanics
to achieve a technological or scientific advantage.
We generally split it up into four categories.
One is quantum computing:
algorithms that use entanglement, superposition
for a computational advantage.
Communication, by the laws of quantum mechanics
you can't copy a state
and so that means you can secure communication.
Sensing: we can have very, very high precision sensors
that exist in quantum mechanical states.
And finally it's simulation.
We want to be able to simulate the world around us,
but many of the interesting materials that we have
have quantum mechanical interactions
that we can't simulate on a classical computer.
You know for myself I remember
taking a cryptography seminar.
I was a math major as an undergraduate
and when I took that seminar I learned
that there was a model of computation,
namely quantum computing,
that could break most of our public key cryptosystems today.
The mainstay of e-commerce today, RSA.
I was perplexed, fascinated and inspired
all at the same time.
And I actually then switched into computer science
because I wanted to be able to take that model
of computation and make it programmable
and enable users to actually program a quantum computer
to solve such problems.
So it's pretty exciting to see this emerge
and the numbers of jobs getting posted
is growing quite rapidly.
LinkedIn said that in the past year and a half
the number of postings in this area
has gone up 180%,
as compared to the prior three to four years.
So significant growth
in this area right now.
So you must see more and more students expressing interest
in quantum information science.
When I first came here I would get a few students a year
asking to work in my laboratory at the undergraduate level.
And now I get several students every week.
Wow.
And my lab can't possibly have that many researchers.
Talking with Professor Fu reinforces
that there's a ton of opportunity and diversity of skills
required in the field of quantum information sciences.
I wanted to hear from some University of Washington students
to understand their experiences and research
and what inspired them to pursue a career in quantum.
I did a double major with math and physics
in my undergrad,
and then slowly realized that everything I liked
about math was actually physics.
My road into quantum information was a little nonlinear.
I was just exploring different fields
and I tried a little bit of synthetic biology.
One day I was working on some homework
in one of the upstairs study rooms
and a grad student came up
and asked if anybody wanted to see something amazing.
He'd just gotten his experiment to work
looking at fluorescent molecules in live cells.
You could actually watch these molecules moving around.
It was just an incredible moment of
I was seeing something that maybe 50 people
had ever seen before and I joined their lab the next week.
So your research here at the University of Washington,
what is it about?
What are you focused on?
My research is in discovering whether we
can use quantum devices to aid in the calculations
relevant for nuclear and particle physics.
I am an ion trapper,
so I trap single barium ions
and then use them to study quantum mechanics.
Working with nitrogen-vacancy defects in diamond.
We have these isolated single atom like defects
in this diamond and we use them as qubits
in a quantum computation system.
The future of quantum computation holds a lot
of promise.
Quantum communication also,
it's the start of something great,
so I want to be part of it.
So as a viewer at home,
what's your recommendation to really start learning
about this exciting field of quantum information?
Be curious.
I mean that's really what I want to say.
Be curious, learn what you can learn now.
Learn about light, how light diffracts through crystals.
Do experiments,
and of course, have a solid foundation in mathematics.
That's probably all you need for entering this field.
I always think back to my own experience.
I never took physics until my graduate school days
when I jumped straight into quantum mechanics
without classical mechanics.
And there are also opportunities
to pick up and start learning quantum programming today
with Q# and the Microsoft Quantum Development Kit.
You can try little exercises in quantum programming
and start to actually be introduced
to some of the concepts of quantum mechanics
in a way that may be more familiar
to one that codes daily, right?
Yeah, and you can even have access to quantum simulators
and quantum computers through the cloud right now
that are publicly accessible
that people can play on,
which is something that just didn't exist five years ago.
Well, thank you so much Kai-Mei
for speaking with me today about this really exciting field.
Well, it was my pleasure to be here.
The University of Washington is focusing
on educating students to be able to jump
into the quantum information sciences
and programs are popping up at universities
around the world,
full of students ready to push the field forward.
It's through these curious and dedicated students
that the next breakthroughs in innovations
in quantum will come.
And I, for one, can't wait to see what they accomplish.
