Prof Michelle Y. Simmons: Quantum computing
is a new type of computing where we’re using
the world at its very smallest, so using individual
atoms to encode information.
If we can control the world at that level
we can control their quantum states.
We get an exponentially predicted increase
in computational power.
It’s grown rapidly over the last few years
and what we’ve realised is it impacts pretty
much every industry.
And so when you basically need a lot of computational
power, where you’ve got lots of information
or you need to sort information very quickly
quantum computers can do that in parallel
rather than sequentially than you can in classical
computing.
And so the areas where we can see this coming
in is things like weather forecasting, economic
modelling, predictive areas in optimisation
problems, so looking at the stock markets
and how they behave, how to optimise traffic
patterns, how to get delivery of goods much
faster, even right down to drug design.
Dr Joris G. Keizer: In the current project
that’s funded by the Australian Research
Fund I make the devices that we will use for
quantum computing later on but we just make
test devices with these components on them
and we send them to India where they do noise
measurements.
Prof Michelle Y. Simmons: International collaborations
are essential if you want to do well in leading
science.
We looked around the world at who was the
best at doing these very low-noise measurements
and certainly the Indian Institute of Science
and Professor Ghosh there is fantastic so
we knew that we wanted to partner with him.
To get those to happen you have to have some
sort of kick starter for that to happen.
It’s very difficult within your own funding
streams to create new projects.
What I’ve really enjoyed about this, this
grant is that we go back and forth with each
country.
I’ve got to see the measurements being done
in their labs, the students have come over
here and seen how the samples are made.
There’s nothing really that replaces that
face to face interaction.
That really allows you to understand the problem.
They can look at the devices we’ve made
and they can tell us what are the issues that
make that device behave badly.
And as a consequence of that we know how to
change our fabrication process to get that
them working much better.
And so that really does accelerate us, to
get towards the goal of getting a scalable
quantum computer that works in the best regime.
Dr Joris G. Keizer: They’re very good at
what they do in India.
On the other side what we do here, making
these devices, we’re currently the only
group in the world that can do that.
So it’s these two very narrow expertises
that matches up in this project.
Prof Michelle Y. Simmons: The research is
definitely gonna increase as a function of
time.
The more we work together the more interesting
things we find.
Actually the more things we don’t understand.
So the more we work together the more doors
we open and we can see that collaboration
getting stronger and stronger.
And I think the rest of the world is really
quite interested in what we get up to.
