Gary Steele joins consortium to build new quantum device
The research group of Prof. Gary Steele is planning to build a quantum device capable of making its own decisions. Steele’s group is part of an ambitious international consortium that has received 2.9 million euros in funding.
The consortium will be led by Professor Michael Hartmann from Heriot-Watt’s Institute of Photonics and Quantum Sciences (IPaQS). It further consists of researchers and scientists from ETH Zurich (Switzerland), University of the Basque Country (Spain), IBM Zurich (Switzerland), and Volkswagen (Germany).
“This project has two main themes” Steele explains. “ETH Zurich and IBM will work on gate-based quantum computing. They are looking to introduce concepts of neural networks to these types of processes. My group will work on a different concept called ‘quantum annealing’. By building networks of oscillators (a sort of pendulum) in quantum superposition states, the network can solve certain quantum problems efficiently by ‘finding the answer itself’.”
The ‘pendulum’ in Steele’s experiments is not a mass on a string, but instead an electrical circuit that consisting of an inductor and a capacitor. “In a normal LC circuit, you can put a charge in on one side and it will oscillate back and forth”, explains Steele. “In a quantum version, however, you can put the charge on both sides of the capacitor at the same time, and this can allow you to do things not possible in classical physics.”
Steele: “We will start by building one of these LC circuits in a quantum superposition. After that, we will scale up and connect multiple circuits to each other on a chip so that they can talk to each other, building bigger and bigger networks.”
How do these networks solve complex quantum problems themselves? “It sounds kind of funny, but the idea is a bit like a kids puzzle where you have a ball in a box that you want to get through a hole. If you keep shaking the toy, the ball will eventually find the hole itself and fall through to the other side. The difference is that in our experiment, quantum mechanics will do the shaking for us, and this gives it a possibility to be very efficient.”
A new Postdoc and a new PhD candidate will join the Gary Steele group for this project, which will kick off in June next year. Funding will be provided within the framework of FET Open, which supports the early-stages of the science and technology research and innovation around new ideas towards radically new future technologies.