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This is the Discovery Files podcast
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from the U..S National Science Foundation.
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At the quantum scales of molecules, atoms
and electrons.
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The laws of physics become peculiar.
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NSF supported researchers are exploring
how to control the behavior
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of these quantum systems to translate
quantum knowledge into next generation
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technologies, such as quantum computers,
that can tackle complex problems
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that are beyond the capabilities of even
the most powerful supercomputers of today.
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We're joined today by Christopher Monroe,
Gilhuly Family Presidential Distinguished
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Professor of Electrical
and Computer engineering and physics
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at Duke
University, and co-founder of IonQ,
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the first publicly traded quantum
computing company.
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Professor Monroe,
thank you so much for joining me today.
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It's a pleasure to be here.
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I want to start with a general question.
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People kind of get lost a little bit,
maybe glaze over when you mention the term
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quantum computing.
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What is quantum computing?
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Yeah. The question.
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Well, let me start with
maybe the bad news.
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Quantum computing.
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We don't yet know exactly how
these devices will be used in the future.
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The very good news.
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And to me it's not hype, It's
a fact, quantum
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computers are able to process and store
data in ways
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that are impossible using standard
computing machinery, and that's why
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they hold great promise for mostly unknown
applications in the future.
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The reason I can say all this is
that they're based on totally new physics.
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Really physics that is not part
of our everyday existence.
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There's no explaining certain things
using everyday intuition.
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This is interesting.
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And the downside to
that is that people aren't used to them.
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There's some very weird ideas behind it
and some people don't even believe in it.
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I think we're maybe, fortunately, beyond
that second statement that, you know,
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people are starting to understand
that the industrial play in quantum
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these days, it's largely
driving the field now.
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It's a very interesting time.
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But if I had to go to 101
quantum computing, I would say
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the bits that we're used to
in classical computing,
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zeros or ones,
they are called quantum bits.
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That's one way to process
quantum information.
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Quantum bits
can be in a superposition of zero and one.
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Zero and one at the same time.
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And when you add more and more bits
together,
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the possibilities grow exponentially.
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And that's really the bonus.
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We can store exponential amounts
of information way more,
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even with hundreds or thousands of qubits.
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That's way more information
than we could store in classical machines.
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So it's very sci fi like in a way.
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There's a lot of hype behind it.
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We know they're going to be useful
for something in the future.
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The question is when.
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It's a wonderful confluence
of fundamental physics
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and very applied engineering
and real devices of the future.
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In your devices,
you're using a trapped ion approach.
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Can you talk a little bit about what
that difference is?
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Right.
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One of the chief and most difficult
requirements in a quantum computer
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is that you can maintain
a superposition of states.
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You can have a zero
and one at the same time.
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And the trick is the way
I think about it is,
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the superpositions only exist
as long as you're not looking,
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as long as it's not observed.
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So you demand an extreme level
of isolation of these systems
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to do the computation.
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The computation happens without looking
and that's very tricky to do.
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It's hard to control something
when you can't even look at it.
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So we indeed use individual atoms
as the bits.
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There are many flavors.
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They don't have to be atomic ions.
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They don't have to be charged
atoms. As we use.
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They can be neutral atoms.
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They can be single electrons,
single photons.
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But they should be something quantum,
something that obeys
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these strange laws
of existing in superposition.
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The trapped ion approach, these are
individual atoms that are charged.
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And because they’re charged,
we can control them so well.
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We can apply electric fields and actually
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levitate them with electromagnetic fields.
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And they're in a vacuum chamber.
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Because not only can
nobody look at the system,
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the system can't be disturbed
by the environment, for instance, by air.
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So we get rid of all the air, they’re
in a vacuum chamber.
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And they're floating.
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They're not part of the surface.
They're not part of a solid.
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They're just sitting there
all by themselves.
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They see each other.
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Trapped ions are acknowledged
to be sort of the purest
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form of isolation of qubits.
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And there are lots of engineering
challenges to scale this platform up.
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But yes, individual atoms,
these are sort of like the transistors
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of our quantum computers.
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I want to build
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towards where you are today a little bit,
and ask you about your earlier work.
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How did your early work with future Nobel
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laureates, you were working with laser
cooled atoms and entangled atoms,
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how did this set you on the path
for working with quantum computing?
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Yeah,
that's a very easy thing for me to answer.
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I worked for many years in Boulder,
Colorado with David
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Wineland at the National Institute
of Standards and Technology.
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We were basically the atomic clock
division of the U.S.
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government, but more than that,
we weren't really making primary
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frequency standards we were conducting
research on to make them better
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and what the future clock pieces
would look like.
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And we, in fact, figured out that
by entangling, this is a buzzword.
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I'll explain in a minute.
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By entangling multiple atoms,
we could make the clock run
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with better signal to noise.
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So this is largely academic at the time
because the improvement was marginal.
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If you entangle two atoms,
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you had a factor of roughly
two better in signal to noise, which is,
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you know, factor two is nice,
but it's a lot of work to entangle them.
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So we were playing around with the physics
of entanglement, being able
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to do all kinds of foundational aspects
of studying the entangled superposition.
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So an entangled superposition is one
that has more than one qubit.
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And the reason it's weird, this is first
pointed out by Einstein in the 1930s.
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He thought he had a way to prove
that quantum mechanics was wrong,
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and he came up with an example,
and it's called entanglement.
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Now, if I give you two qubits,
I think of them as coins.
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Sometimes heads and tails, zeros and ones,
whatever you want.
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If I produce two qubits
and they're in a superposition
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of both zero and both one,
that's a very interesting superposition,
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because when you measure
just one of those two qubits,
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what happens is the
and I didn't say this earlier.
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It's important
you have to look at qubits in the end.
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I mean, what good is a computer
that you never look at?
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When you measure a superposition, it
randomly pops into one of its many states.
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So there's sort of noise
coming out of the ether.
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In a way.
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This superposition that's entangled,
I mentioned zero zero and one one.
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When you look at
just one of the two qubits,
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you know it's state,
you measure it's state 0 or 1,
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but then the other one gets measured
also implicitly at the same time
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because they're correlated.
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You prepared them
in this entangled superposition.
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And what Einstein realized is that
that's very strange
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because it appears that there was action
at a distance by
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these qubits
could have been really far apart.
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And by measuring one of them,
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somehow we learn that
the other one is in the same state.
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And that's very strange.
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It doesn't violate any laws of physics
of course, it doesn't allow you
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to communicate information
faster than light,
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because even though you know
that state of the other qubit, faster
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than light could have made the distance,
if you do it over and over again,
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it's totally random, and there's
no information content in random bits.
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That's sort of the close of that paradox.
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But Einstein didn't know about information
theory at the time in the 30s, I guess.
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So we were making entangled states
for these clocks for academic reasons,
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indeed to do foundational quantum studies.
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And then this is 1993, 1994,
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and then Peter Shor
published his algorithm that showed that
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if we had a quantum computer,
we could factor numbers into their primes.
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We could therefore break codes,
break public key encryption systems.
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And this was a big deal
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because it seemed to have changed
the complexity class of a certain problem.
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In other words,
it put quantum computing on the map.
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It showed that yes,
there is an application.
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It's not. As I said earlier,
we don't know what's going to be used for.
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We do know there's one exception.
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We know it will be used to factor numbers,
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which sounds kind of boring in a way,
but it's very important for cryptography.
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So we sort of backed into the field
of quantum computing by making clocks.
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And I guess I lived through that.
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And I'd been told that you do
basic research, fundamental research,
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you never know where it's going to go.
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And most of the time it fails.
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It doesn't go into a cool direction.
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But this is one example,
is kind of a spectacular one where
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studying one thing pivots into something
else.
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And, you know, that was 30 years ago and
it's been a remarkable growth since then.
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So early on playing around
with these atoms to make better clocks.
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And this followed up on my work
going toward
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Bose condensation with cold atoms
in Carl Wieman's group, also in Boulder.
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That gave me the background
in atomic physics
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to start this path of quantum computing.
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As you said, it's been a number of years
since then, and things have progressed.
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At what point did you know
it was time to start a company?
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Well, literally,
I suppose it was when a particular venture
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capitalist visited my office
and said, it's time to start a company.
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I certainly wasn't going to go out.
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I didn't know how to start a company.
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I wasn't going to go out and try unless,
you know, unless the bar was low
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and there was a good business plan
and it wasn't that simple.
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But there was a particular venture
capitalist, really nice guy
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name of Harry Weller.
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He visited my office in College Park,
Maryland, 2014.
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So a little more than ten years ago.
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He had a physics undergrad degree
so he could read some of this stuff.
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And my colleague
and friend junks saying, come.
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So I was at Maryland at the time
and Jungsang Kim.
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At Duke.
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We started collaborating about ten years
before that, building bigger iron traps,
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thinking about how to scale up, applying
lots of engineering approaches,
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making it cheaper, using lasers
that were much easier to use.
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And so it wasn't a business exactly,
but we were sort of plotting the path
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so we didn't have to worry about all the
atomic physics and the control of atoms.
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With optics,
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we could start thinking about programing
small algorithms and our machines.
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We were actually doing that,
and we wrote a paper,
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it was an architecture paper on how
to scale a large scale quantum computer
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based on photonic interconnects
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and so forth with these trapped ions,
although it's more general than that.
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And this venture capitalist
apparently read Physical Review a
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he read that paper
and he waved it in my face in my options.
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You know, this reads like a business plan.
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And so I sort of laughed it off.
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But over the next few years, he convinced
our universities about IP agreements.
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Just the other day, I was telling somebody
that IP is a nuisance,
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but you have to get intellectual property,
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wrap it up,
get it licensed to have a startup.
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And so it was easy to do that because we
had a lot of ideas that could be patented.
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And the universities at Maryland
and Duke really bought into the idea.
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And there we were.
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We started off and again,
even to this day, that's ten years ago,
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industry and quantum computing,
they're still doing a lot of research.
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And so it wasn't like
we were building cars all of a sudden,
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and we had to roll off
10,000 cars a week off the assembly line.
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We still had to execute a plan that was
we didn't know exactly how we'd play out.
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We would need to invent new technologies.
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It would be very expensive.
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And that's why
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the business model made sense,
because we could have budgets that were,
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you know, we didn't have to worry
so much about duct tape and gluing
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things together with epoxy,
like we do in a physics lab.
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So how has NSF support
impacted your work at IonQ?
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Very much so.
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I think the formative days up
till we formed IonQ.
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I can give you one example.
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I was at the University of Michigan
for many years.
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They are and they were well known
for their work in pulsed
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lasers, high energy
ultrafast lasers to study
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fast dynamics and nonlinear optics,
and so forth.
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I had never used a pulse laser in my life.
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When I went to Michigan in 2000
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and I got to working
with some of my colleagues there
238
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Phil Bucksbaum, Gerard Mourou, and others
who use these lasers.
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And I got less afraid of these lasers.
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Now, the reason I bring that up
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is that when the NSF Physics
Frontier Center started.
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That's right.
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When I arrived at Michigan
and we went after one of the physics
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frontier centers, and we were awarded
the focus center at Michigan
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that would use ultra, study ultrafast
science in many different facets.
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And I had not done anything ever
in ultra fast.
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But I started to
and the reason this is important
248
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is that the laser that we used
to control these atoms without looking,
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it turned out
the best lasers were pulsed lasers.
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The reason they were the best lasers
is that they were made for
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lithography of silicon chips,
for a totally different reason.
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They were very reliable.
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I used to say this laser has one knob
and it's the on key.
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You turn it on and it works.
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It works for years.
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And that allowed us
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to not have to pay attention
to tuning up a laser for four hours
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every single day, which I'd been used to,
and we could move on to other things.
259
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And so in Michigan,
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I learned how to use lasers
that were more mature, better engineered.
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And, you know, that was a direct result
of a big NSF center there.
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And when I went to Maryland,
we also had a physics frontier center
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on controlling quantum systems
and so forth.
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And throughout the years, ever since
I left NIST in 2000, I like to say
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that the NSF grants were the best
color of money because I had more freedom.
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Of course, there are milestones.
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You have to write a proposal
and it's very competitive.
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00:13:49,995 --> 00:13:53,332
But once the NSF awards you the grant,
they're not going to check on you
269
00:13:53,332 --> 00:13:54,800
every six months. You say, well,
how did you do?
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You promised you do that?
You promised to do that?
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And there was in a sense, trust.
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00:13:58,771 --> 00:14:00,339
And that's what you have to do when, when
273
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you're on a path of fundamental physics
or fundamental science
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00:14:04,243 --> 00:14:06,078
that you're not sure
where it's going to go.
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00:14:06,078 --> 00:14:08,914
And of course, if you want to get funded
again, you better show something.
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Even if it pivots, even if it's something
totally different, it's valuable.
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00:14:13,252 --> 00:14:16,388
And those grants throughout the years,
there were many programs in AMO and
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00:14:17,089 --> 00:14:20,259
physics at the information
frontier, and NSF, see really
279
00:14:20,259 --> 00:14:23,462
wanted to capture quantum in ways
that the other agencies really couldn't.
280
00:14:23,462 --> 00:14:26,098
And they, you know,
they largely succeeded in that.
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00:14:26,098 --> 00:14:30,903
I will say, in the last several years,
one of my heroes at NSF, Bogdan Mihaila,
282
00:14:31,270 --> 00:14:34,273
he realized that we were not just
doing atomic physics,
283
00:14:34,506 --> 00:14:35,875
but we were studying algorithms.
284
00:14:35,875 --> 00:14:39,078
We were designing
algorithms to match with our atoms.
285
00:14:39,078 --> 00:14:43,115
And and that we call it
a vertical research institute.
286
00:14:43,115 --> 00:14:45,618
And that that spawned what we call STAQ.
287
00:14:45,618 --> 00:14:46,785
S-T-A-Q.
288
00:14:46,785 --> 00:14:48,053
Basically, applying quantum
289
00:14:48,053 --> 00:14:51,991
software to a very mature quantum system
that we can engineer.
290
00:14:51,991 --> 00:14:54,226
We it's almost like a user facility.
291
00:14:54,226 --> 00:14:57,029
The way we run this place here
at Duke, at the Duke Quantum Center,
292
00:14:57,029 --> 00:15:00,900
we have so many collaborations
where people run their ideas
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00:15:01,100 --> 00:15:02,701
through our machines.
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It's almost like a company could do that,
but we do it for science.
295
00:15:05,404 --> 00:15:09,842
We're not interested in optimizing
a traveling salesman problem for Amazon.
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I mean, we love to do that,
but we're also interested
297
00:15:12,144 --> 00:15:15,881
in studying phase transitions,
simulating correlated matter.
298
00:15:15,881 --> 00:15:18,984
And again, I think NSF really
because of their science basis,
299
00:15:19,351 --> 00:15:22,988
it was a super important part of the US
posture in quantum.
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00:15:23,222 --> 00:15:26,492
What has been the biggest challenge
translating
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00:15:26,492 --> 00:15:29,595
research
into more industrial applications.
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00:15:30,896 --> 00:15:33,098
IonQ by now is a very big company.
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00:15:33,098 --> 00:15:34,633
And they're a public company.
304
00:15:34,633 --> 00:15:38,971
And with that comes severe challenges
of talking to the street.
305
00:15:39,471 --> 00:15:42,241
I've never thought that job number one
is to
306
00:15:42,241 --> 00:15:45,344
make sure the stock is buoyant,
but I understand that it needs to be.
307
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Otherwise the company doesn't exist.
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00:15:47,813 --> 00:15:51,083
And so to me, the central challenge is
how do you balance?
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00:15:51,317 --> 00:15:55,921
I'll sound a cliche, you know, how do you
balance future research and development
310
00:15:56,388 --> 00:16:00,492
with current revenue
and sales and interest in the company?
311
00:16:01,160 --> 00:16:04,163
I’ll never claim to be a businessman
or a,
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00:16:04,863 --> 00:16:07,967
you know, even though I'm involved
with a company, but you have to have
313
00:16:07,967 --> 00:16:10,970
a little bit of both, and it's
you really shouldn't be all of one
314
00:16:11,437 --> 00:16:12,204
and none of the other.
315
00:16:12,204 --> 00:16:14,840
You can't do 100% research at a company.
316
00:16:14,840 --> 00:16:17,409
People tend not to want to invest in that.
317
00:16:17,409 --> 00:16:21,213
If you have a long term investor, it's
probably not the public that's investing.
318
00:16:21,613 --> 00:16:25,784
If you're only doing, you know,
sales and revenue and you're not looking
319
00:16:25,784 --> 00:16:29,154
in the out years, that's an equal recipe
for disaster in this field.
320
00:16:29,154 --> 00:16:32,157
So to me,
that was the most difficult calculation.
321
00:16:32,458 --> 00:16:35,861
How much to sell and how much to do R&D.
322
00:16:35,861 --> 00:16:38,230
I will add a little short story on that.
323
00:16:38,230 --> 00:16:41,800
I was CEO of the company for about a year,
when we were just starting to produce
324
00:16:41,800 --> 00:16:46,305
our first few systems,
and we started working with AWS,
325
00:16:47,306 --> 00:16:50,309
Amazon Web Services
to put one of our machines on the cloud.
326
00:16:50,642 --> 00:16:54,113
I mean, the great thing about any computer
is that especially a quantum computer,
327
00:16:54,146 --> 00:16:55,347
it doesn't need to be in front of you.
328
00:16:55,347 --> 00:16:57,182
You can use it on the cloud.
329
00:16:57,182 --> 00:17:01,520
And that exercise was tricky because
it meant that we had to run a machine
330
00:17:01,987 --> 00:17:06,658
that would be up 24-7,
and therefore it's not getting any better.
331
00:17:06,725 --> 00:17:07,559
It's just running.
332
00:17:07,559 --> 00:17:10,829
We're not improving things,
and that's not what I'd been used
333
00:17:10,829 --> 00:17:13,832
to, you know, always improving things,
looking at the next thing.
334
00:17:13,899 --> 00:17:17,102
And I was actually sort of against
doing it, putting it in the cloud.
335
00:17:17,102 --> 00:17:19,038
It would also get revenue and that's fine.
336
00:17:19,038 --> 00:17:20,806
The revenue was good.
337
00:17:20,806 --> 00:17:23,642
But I learned later on that it actually
was really important
338
00:17:23,642 --> 00:17:27,980
to build a system that would work 24-7
the engineering behind that.
339
00:17:27,980 --> 00:17:31,150
And, you know, engineering
is something that I don't come natural to.
340
00:17:31,150 --> 00:17:35,254
It's very hard to teach engineering,
systems engineering, but making something
341
00:17:35,254 --> 00:17:40,359
work 24-7 is an exercise
that you will learn the next.
342
00:17:40,459 --> 00:17:43,095
The research systems will benefit
from that.
343
00:17:43,095 --> 00:17:45,197
That was, an interesting lesson
I learned.
344
00:17:45,197 --> 00:17:48,967
So maybe I erred too much on the research
side, I'm not sure, but we ended up
345
00:17:48,967 --> 00:17:50,969
putting them on the cloud,
all of the clouds.
346
00:17:50,969 --> 00:17:54,540
And I think, IonQ and other companies
that do that are much better off
347
00:17:54,540 --> 00:17:55,140
for doing that.
348
00:17:55,140 --> 00:17:57,476
The other kind of business question
I want to ask you
349
00:17:57,476 --> 00:18:00,479
was, can you tell us a little bit
about your experience
350
00:18:00,813 --> 00:18:04,917
making that jump from being a startup
company into a public traded company?
351
00:18:05,884 --> 00:18:07,486
We were sort of lucky in
352
00:18:07,486 --> 00:18:11,356
the timing of this, and
it actually happened right out of Covid
353
00:18:11,623 --> 00:18:15,961
when as a private company,
we'd just raised a bunch of funding
354
00:18:16,395 --> 00:18:19,965
that would give us,
I don't know, maybe a 3 or 4 year
355
00:18:20,132 --> 00:18:23,635
runway, as they say, because we weren't
really bringing in much money.
356
00:18:23,635 --> 00:18:24,770
We were spending it.
357
00:18:24,770 --> 00:18:26,205
And the investors understood this.
358
00:18:26,205 --> 00:18:27,739
This is a long term play.
359
00:18:27,739 --> 00:18:30,943
And when Covid hit our board,
which was largely
360
00:18:31,310 --> 00:18:34,713
our investors, they said, we don't know
how bad this Covid thing is going to be.
361
00:18:34,713 --> 00:18:36,115
You need to really think about that.
362
00:18:36,115 --> 00:18:40,752
3 or 4 years to be 7 or 8 years, is it
maybe there's a recession and so forth.
363
00:18:42,020 --> 00:18:45,157
And the one risk for the company back
then was raising capital.
364
00:18:45,157 --> 00:18:47,793
Really, we weren't too worried
about our technical plan.
365
00:18:47,793 --> 00:18:52,231
It was very solid, not easy, but
we weren't fundamentally worried about it.
366
00:18:52,231 --> 00:18:53,932
We were worried
about having to raise money again.
367
00:18:53,932 --> 00:18:56,401
And that's
that's the bane of startup companies.
368
00:18:56,401 --> 00:18:59,404
With venture capital, you have to
keep raising and you're always out there.
369
00:18:59,671 --> 00:19:04,209
And so when the opportunity came,
a so-called blank check company
370
00:19:04,443 --> 00:19:07,679
also called SPAC,
Special Purpose Acquisition Company,
371
00:19:08,213 --> 00:19:12,651
they have a spot on the stock exchange,
in this case, the New York Stock Exchange.
372
00:19:13,185 --> 00:19:16,722
They have investors with lots of cash,
and they want to plow it
373
00:19:16,722 --> 00:19:19,258
into a particular company
that will become public.
374
00:19:19,258 --> 00:19:21,393
So it's a shortcut to an IPO.
375
00:19:21,393 --> 00:19:25,297
We were sort of lucky that these folks
were very interested in the quantum field,
376
00:19:25,297 --> 00:19:27,099
in our company in particular.
377
00:19:27,099 --> 00:19:30,102
And I was told by the folks
that ran the SPAC
378
00:19:30,302 --> 00:19:34,673
that they wanted a company
that had excellent foundational people
379
00:19:34,907 --> 00:19:39,211
fundamentals, and that was Junsang Kim
and myself in the in the ion trap basics,
380
00:19:39,678 --> 00:19:43,081
you know, largely
riding on decades of mature research
381
00:19:43,415 --> 00:19:45,083
that was ready to be engineered,
382
00:19:45,083 --> 00:19:48,453
but then also the CEO we had
and that was Peter Chapman.
383
00:19:48,453 --> 00:19:51,089
And he he is an excellent salesman.
384
00:19:51,089 --> 00:19:54,159
So we had sort of both parts
what you need to have a company
385
00:19:54,726 --> 00:19:57,462
and our SPACs kind of
I call them benefactors.
386
00:19:57,462 --> 00:20:01,466
It's not the right word, but our sponsors,
they wanted to make a play in quantum,
387
00:20:01,466 --> 00:20:03,068
knowing how risky it was.
388
00:20:03,068 --> 00:20:07,005
But they had a good foundation,
an eye toward revenue and sales as well.
389
00:20:07,472 --> 00:20:09,775
You know, how do you balance that?
That's the tricky thing.
390
00:20:09,775 --> 00:20:11,043
So that was the transition.
391
00:20:11,043 --> 00:20:14,880
And, you know, we started getting more
professional, getting a professional
392
00:20:14,880 --> 00:20:18,550
finance team, legal team, all that stuff
that comes with the public company,
393
00:20:19,218 --> 00:20:21,720
the company was different
after going public for sure.
394
00:20:21,720 --> 00:20:25,591
And I think the pressure you know,
their quarterly stock report earnings
395
00:20:25,891 --> 00:20:28,894
where we talk
directly to investors in the street.
396
00:20:29,528 --> 00:20:31,697
It's still strange those interactions.
397
00:20:31,697 --> 00:20:35,667
But I give the analysts and the investors,
the people on Wall Street
398
00:20:35,667 --> 00:20:36,735
a lot of credit.
399
00:20:36,735 --> 00:20:38,337
They seem to read about this field.
400
00:20:38,337 --> 00:20:41,873
They think quantum will will enhance
AI in the future.
401
00:20:42,341 --> 00:20:46,245
It's a question of time,
I guess, in terms of prosecution
402
00:20:46,245 --> 00:20:49,248
of our technical plan
that just went into hyperdrive
403
00:20:49,348 --> 00:20:52,818
with the public funding,
we were really able to just go crazy
404
00:20:52,818 --> 00:20:56,154
and go much faster,
make more systems, hire a lot of people.
405
00:20:56,755 --> 00:20:58,924
So, you know,
I have to say, you know, it's good timing.
406
00:20:58,924 --> 00:21:02,160
I think it's a little harder to do that
now, but, yeah, it worked out well.
407
00:21:02,227 --> 00:21:02,761
Very cool.
408
00:21:02,761 --> 00:21:06,698
So for my last question,
you said there's a lot of question
409
00:21:06,698 --> 00:21:10,469
for what quantum computing
will ultimately be used for,
410
00:21:10,602 --> 00:21:15,007
but what impacts do you think it will
have on science and society?
411
00:21:17,276 --> 00:21:19,044
Again, taking the long view,
412
00:21:19,044 --> 00:21:23,582
I'm quite sure that we will have quantum
computers decades from now.
413
00:21:23,615 --> 00:21:24,316
For sure.
414
00:21:24,316 --> 00:21:30,188
That will be deployed for certain problems
and the tricky thing there is that the
415
00:21:30,188 --> 00:21:35,661
public largely doesn't know or understand
or care about these new laws of physics.
416
00:21:35,894 --> 00:21:38,897
They really are fundamentally
different laws of physics.
417
00:21:39,431 --> 00:21:44,469
And I think for people to fully appreciate
the power of quantum computers
418
00:21:44,469 --> 00:21:48,206
and to accelerate their use
in different fields, people should be
419
00:21:48,206 --> 00:21:51,643
learning the fundamentals of quantum
even at a young age.
420
00:21:51,643 --> 00:21:55,580
And I do believe
maybe it's more of a hope, but in 50 years
421
00:21:55,981 --> 00:21:58,784
people will have an intuition
for some of these weird things,
422
00:21:58,784 --> 00:22:02,654
like “spooky action at a distance”,
the Einstein quote about entanglement.
423
00:22:02,954 --> 00:22:03,922
They'll have a feel for it.
424
00:22:03,922 --> 00:22:07,926
They'll they'll know that small,
very simple systems, when they're cold
425
00:22:07,926 --> 00:22:12,464
and they're isolated, they,
they behave according to these laws.
426
00:22:12,464 --> 00:22:17,235
So I think that's a total shift in the way
we think about fundamental physics,
427
00:22:17,235 --> 00:22:18,203
for sure.
428
00:22:18,203 --> 00:22:20,972
And maybe it'll be infectious
and hit other fields
429
00:22:20,972 --> 00:22:23,942
from chemistry to more complex
things like in biology.
430
00:22:24,509 --> 00:22:28,313
So I think quantum is not ready
to tackle biological problems.
431
00:22:28,313 --> 00:22:30,115
They’re still way too complicated,
432
00:22:30,115 --> 00:22:34,086
but I am quite sure it will eventually,
and I can say that safely because.
433
00:22:34,086 --> 00:22:37,823
I probably won't be alive
when it hits that level, but
434
00:22:38,123 --> 00:22:41,993
quantum is, in terms
of the entire community of physics.
435
00:22:42,361 --> 00:22:46,264
We all eat and breathe quantum physics,
but it's not so useful
436
00:22:46,264 --> 00:22:47,099
out in the real world.
437
00:22:47,099 --> 00:22:52,270
This is a way to change that, and I think
it also will propel physics overall
438
00:22:52,270 --> 00:22:56,842
as something that is absolutely required
if you want to understand how to compute.
439
00:22:56,842 --> 00:23:00,078
I mean, I guess physics is behind
the transistor, we all know that.
440
00:23:00,078 --> 00:23:02,514
But the model of a transistor
is very easy.
441
00:23:02,514 --> 00:23:03,782
It's like turning on a valve,
442
00:23:03,782 --> 00:23:07,119
a water hose with a valve or something
electronically controlled valve.
443
00:23:07,586 --> 00:23:09,521
You can make models that go far.
444
00:23:09,521 --> 00:23:11,022
You don't have to learn all the physics.
445
00:23:11,022 --> 00:23:12,958
But quantum,
unfortunately, is not like that.
446
00:23:12,958 --> 00:23:14,559
We have nothing. We can turn to.
447
00:23:14,559 --> 00:23:18,663
So I think quantum computing
can be much bigger than just devices.
448
00:23:18,663 --> 00:23:21,666
It can really bring physics to the masses
449
00:23:21,900 --> 00:23:25,704
and get many more people studying physics
and then going on to other things.
450
00:23:25,904 --> 00:23:28,740
Special thanks to Christopher
Monroe and Alexander Cronin.
451
00:23:28,740 --> 00:23:31,710
For the Discovery Files, I'm Nate Pottker.
Watch video versions
452
00:23:31,710 --> 00:23:34,713
of these conversations on our @NSFscience
YouTube channel.
453
00:23:34,946 --> 00:23:38,450
Please subscribe wherever you get podcasts
and if you like our program, share
454
00:23:38,450 --> 00:23:40,519
with a friend
and consider leaving a review.
455
00:23:42,721 --> 00:23:43,555
Discover how the U.S.
456
00:23:43,555 --> 00:23:46,858
National Science Foundation
is advancing research at NSF.gov.
00:00:03,603 --> 00:00:05,605
This is the Discovery Files podcast
2
00:00:05,605 --> 00:00:08,608
from the U..S National Science Foundation.
3
00:00:10,076 --> 00:00:13,179
At the quantum scales of molecules, atoms
and electrons.
4
00:00:13,279 --> 00:00:15,782
The laws of physics become peculiar.
5
00:00:15,782 --> 00:00:19,619
NSF supported researchers are exploring
how to control the behavior
6
00:00:19,619 --> 00:00:23,690
of these quantum systems to translate
quantum knowledge into next generation
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technologies, such as quantum computers,
that can tackle complex problems
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that are beyond the capabilities of even
the most powerful supercomputers of today.
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We're joined today by Christopher Monroe,
Gilhuly Family Presidential Distinguished
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Professor of Electrical
and Computer engineering and physics
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at Duke
University, and co-founder of IonQ,
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the first publicly traded quantum
computing company.
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Professor Monroe,
thank you so much for joining me today.
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It's a pleasure to be here.
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I want to start with a general question.
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People kind of get lost a little bit,
maybe glaze over when you mention the term
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quantum computing.
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What is quantum computing?
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Yeah. The question.
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Well, let me start with
maybe the bad news.
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Quantum computing.
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We don't yet know exactly how
these devices will be used in the future.
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The very good news.
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And to me it's not hype, It's
a fact, quantum
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computers are able to process and store
data in ways
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that are impossible using standard
computing machinery, and that's why
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they hold great promise for mostly unknown
applications in the future.
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The reason I can say all this is
that they're based on totally new physics.
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Really physics that is not part
of our everyday existence.
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There's no explaining certain things
using everyday intuition.
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This is interesting.
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And the downside to
that is that people aren't used to them.
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There's some very weird ideas behind it
and some people don't even believe in it.
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I think we're maybe, fortunately, beyond
that second statement that, you know,
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people are starting to understand
that the industrial play in quantum
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these days, it's largely
driving the field now.
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It's a very interesting time.
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But if I had to go to 101
quantum computing, I would say
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the bits that we're used to
in classical computing,
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zeros or ones,
they are called quantum bits.
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That's one way to process
quantum information.
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Quantum bits
can be in a superposition of zero and one.
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Zero and one at the same time.
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And when you add more and more bits
together,
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the possibilities grow exponentially.
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And that's really the bonus.
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We can store exponential amounts
of information way more,
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even with hundreds or thousands of qubits.
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That's way more information
than we could store in classical machines.
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So it's very sci fi like in a way.
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There's a lot of hype behind it.
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We know they're going to be useful
for something in the future.
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The question is when.
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It's a wonderful confluence
of fundamental physics
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and very applied engineering
and real devices of the future.
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In your devices,
you're using a trapped ion approach.
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Can you talk a little bit about what
that difference is?
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Right.
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One of the chief and most difficult
requirements in a quantum computer
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is that you can maintain
a superposition of states.
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You can have a zero
and one at the same time.
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And the trick is the way
I think about it is,
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the superpositions only exist
as long as you're not looking,
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as long as it's not observed.
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So you demand an extreme level
of isolation of these systems
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to do the computation.
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The computation happens without looking
and that's very tricky to do.
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It's hard to control something
when you can't even look at it.
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So we indeed use individual atoms
as the bits.
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There are many flavors.
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They don't have to be atomic ions.
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They don't have to be charged
atoms. As we use.
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They can be neutral atoms.
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They can be single electrons,
single photons.
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But they should be something quantum,
something that obeys
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these strange laws
of existing in superposition.
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The trapped ion approach, these are
individual atoms that are charged.
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And because they’re charged,
we can control them so well.
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We can apply electric fields and actually
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levitate them with electromagnetic fields.
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And they're in a vacuum chamber.
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Because not only can
nobody look at the system,
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the system can't be disturbed
by the environment, for instance, by air.
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So we get rid of all the air, they’re
in a vacuum chamber.
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And they're floating.
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They're not part of the surface.
They're not part of a solid.
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They're just sitting there
all by themselves.
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They see each other.
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Trapped ions are acknowledged
to be sort of the purest
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form of isolation of qubits.
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And there are lots of engineering
challenges to scale this platform up.
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But yes, individual atoms,
these are sort of like the transistors
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of our quantum computers.
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I want to build
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towards where you are today a little bit,
and ask you about your earlier work.
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How did your early work with future Nobel
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laureates, you were working with laser
cooled atoms and entangled atoms,
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how did this set you on the path
for working with quantum computing?
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Yeah,
that's a very easy thing for me to answer.
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I worked for many years in Boulder,
Colorado with David
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Wineland at the National Institute
of Standards and Technology.
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We were basically the atomic clock
division of the U.S.
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government, but more than that,
we weren't really making primary
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frequency standards we were conducting
research on to make them better
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and what the future clock pieces
would look like.
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And we, in fact, figured out that
by entangling, this is a buzzword.
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I'll explain in a minute.
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By entangling multiple atoms,
we could make the clock run
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with better signal to noise.
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So this is largely academic at the time
because the improvement was marginal.
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If you entangle two atoms,
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you had a factor of roughly
two better in signal to noise, which is,
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you know, factor two is nice,
but it's a lot of work to entangle them.
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So we were playing around with the physics
of entanglement, being able
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to do all kinds of foundational aspects
of studying the entangled superposition.
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So an entangled superposition is one
that has more than one qubit.
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And the reason it's weird, this is first
pointed out by Einstein in the 1930s.
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He thought he had a way to prove
that quantum mechanics was wrong,
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and he came up with an example,
and it's called entanglement.
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Now, if I give you two qubits,
I think of them as coins.
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Sometimes heads and tails, zeros and ones,
whatever you want.
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If I produce two qubits
and they're in a superposition
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of both zero and both one,
that's a very interesting superposition,
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because when you measure
just one of those two qubits,
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what happens is the
and I didn't say this earlier.
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It's important
you have to look at qubits in the end.
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I mean, what good is a computer
that you never look at?
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When you measure a superposition, it
randomly pops into one of its many states.
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So there's sort of noise
coming out of the ether.
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In a way.
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This superposition that's entangled,
I mentioned zero zero and one one.
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When you look at
just one of the two qubits,
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you know it's state,
you measure it's state 0 or 1,
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but then the other one gets measured
also implicitly at the same time
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because they're correlated.
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You prepared them
in this entangled superposition.
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And what Einstein realized is that
that's very strange
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because it appears that there was action
at a distance by
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these qubits
could have been really far apart.
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And by measuring one of them,
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somehow we learn that
the other one is in the same state.
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And that's very strange.
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It doesn't violate any laws of physics
of course, it doesn't allow you
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to communicate information
faster than light,
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because even though you know
that state of the other qubit, faster
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than light could have made the distance,
if you do it over and over again,
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it's totally random, and there's
no information content in random bits.
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That's sort of the close of that paradox.
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But Einstein didn't know about information
theory at the time in the 30s, I guess.
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So we were making entangled states
for these clocks for academic reasons,
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indeed to do foundational quantum studies.
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And then this is 1993, 1994,
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and then Peter Shor
published his algorithm that showed that
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if we had a quantum computer,
we could factor numbers into their primes.
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We could therefore break codes,
break public key encryption systems.
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And this was a big deal
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because it seemed to have changed
the complexity class of a certain problem.
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In other words,
it put quantum computing on the map.
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It showed that yes,
there is an application.
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It's not. As I said earlier,
we don't know what's going to be used for.
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We do know there's one exception.
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We know it will be used to factor numbers,
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which sounds kind of boring in a way,
but it's very important for cryptography.
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So we sort of backed into the field
of quantum computing by making clocks.
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And I guess I lived through that.
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And I'd been told that you do
basic research, fundamental research,
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you never know where it's going to go.
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And most of the time it fails.
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It doesn't go into a cool direction.
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But this is one example,
is kind of a spectacular one where
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studying one thing pivots into something
else.
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And, you know, that was 30 years ago and
it's been a remarkable growth since then.
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So early on playing around
with these atoms to make better clocks.
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And this followed up on my work
going toward
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Bose condensation with cold atoms
in Carl Wieman's group, also in Boulder.
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That gave me the background
in atomic physics
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to start this path of quantum computing.
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As you said, it's been a number of years
since then, and things have progressed.
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At what point did you know
it was time to start a company?
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Well, literally,
I suppose it was when a particular venture
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capitalist visited my office
and said, it's time to start a company.
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I certainly wasn't going to go out.
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I didn't know how to start a company.
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I wasn't going to go out and try unless,
you know, unless the bar was low
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and there was a good business plan
and it wasn't that simple.
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But there was a particular venture
capitalist, really nice guy
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name of Harry Weller.
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He visited my office in College Park,
Maryland, 2014.
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So a little more than ten years ago.
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He had a physics undergrad degree
so he could read some of this stuff.
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And my colleague
and friend junks saying, come.
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So I was at Maryland at the time
and Jungsang Kim.
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At Duke.
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We started collaborating about ten years
before that, building bigger iron traps,
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thinking about how to scale up, applying
lots of engineering approaches,
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making it cheaper, using lasers
that were much easier to use.
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And so it wasn't a business exactly,
but we were sort of plotting the path
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so we didn't have to worry about all the
atomic physics and the control of atoms.
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With optics,
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we could start thinking about programing
small algorithms and our machines.
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We were actually doing that,
and we wrote a paper,
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it was an architecture paper on how
to scale a large scale quantum computer
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based on photonic interconnects
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and so forth with these trapped ions,
although it's more general than that.
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And this venture capitalist
apparently read Physical Review a
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he read that paper
and he waved it in my face in my options.
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You know, this reads like a business plan.
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And so I sort of laughed it off.
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But over the next few years, he convinced
our universities about IP agreements.
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Just the other day, I was telling somebody
that IP is a nuisance,
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but you have to get intellectual property,
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wrap it up,
get it licensed to have a startup.
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And so it was easy to do that because we
had a lot of ideas that could be patented.
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And the universities at Maryland
and Duke really bought into the idea.
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And there we were.
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We started off and again,
even to this day, that's ten years ago,
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industry and quantum computing,
they're still doing a lot of research.
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And so it wasn't like
we were building cars all of a sudden,
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and we had to roll off
10,000 cars a week off the assembly line.
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We still had to execute a plan that was
we didn't know exactly how we'd play out.
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We would need to invent new technologies.
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It would be very expensive.
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And that's why
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the business model made sense,
because we could have budgets that were,
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you know, we didn't have to worry
so much about duct tape and gluing
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things together with epoxy,
like we do in a physics lab.
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So how has NSF support
impacted your work at IonQ?
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Very much so.
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I think the formative days up
till we formed IonQ.
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I can give you one example.
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I was at the University of Michigan
for many years.
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They are and they were well known
for their work in pulsed
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lasers, high energy
ultrafast lasers to study
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fast dynamics and nonlinear optics,
and so forth.
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I had never used a pulse laser in my life.
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When I went to Michigan in 2000
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and I got to working
with some of my colleagues there
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Phil Bucksbaum, Gerard Mourou, and others
who use these lasers.
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And I got less afraid of these lasers.
240
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Now, the reason I bring that up
241
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is that when the NSF Physics
Frontier Center started.
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00:12:32,151 --> 00:12:32,585
That's right.
243
00:12:32,585 --> 00:12:36,288
When I arrived at Michigan
and we went after one of the physics
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frontier centers, and we were awarded
the focus center at Michigan
245
00:12:40,259 --> 00:12:43,529
that would use ultra, study ultrafast
science in many different facets.
246
00:12:44,263 --> 00:12:46,766
And I had not done anything ever
in ultra fast.
247
00:12:46,766 --> 00:12:50,202
But I started to
and the reason this is important
248
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is that the laser that we used
to control these atoms without looking,
249
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it turned out
the best lasers were pulsed lasers.
250
00:12:57,810 --> 00:13:00,813
The reason they were the best lasers
is that they were made for
251
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lithography of silicon chips,
for a totally different reason.
252
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They were very reliable.
253
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I used to say this laser has one knob
and it's the on key.
254
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You turn it on and it works.
255
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It works for years.
256
00:13:12,691 --> 00:13:13,893
And that allowed us
257
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to not have to pay attention
to tuning up a laser for four hours
258
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every single day, which I'd been used to,
and we could move on to other things.
259
00:13:21,934 --> 00:13:23,435
And so in Michigan,
260
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I learned how to use lasers
that were more mature, better engineered.
261
00:13:27,373 --> 00:13:30,876
And, you know, that was a direct result
of a big NSF center there.
262
00:13:30,876 --> 00:13:34,313
And when I went to Maryland,
we also had a physics frontier center
263
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on controlling quantum systems
and so forth.
264
00:13:37,349 --> 00:13:41,220
And throughout the years, ever since
I left NIST in 2000, I like to say
265
00:13:41,220 --> 00:13:45,858
that the NSF grants were the best
color of money because I had more freedom.
266
00:13:45,958 --> 00:13:47,092
Of course, there are milestones.
267
00:13:47,092 --> 00:13:49,995
You have to write a proposal
and it's very competitive.
268
00:13:49,995 --> 00:13:53,332
But once the NSF awards you the grant,
they're not going to check on you
269
00:13:53,332 --> 00:13:54,800
every six months. You say, well,
how did you do?
270
00:13:54,800 --> 00:13:57,169
You promised you do that?
You promised to do that?
271
00:13:57,169 --> 00:13:58,771
And there was in a sense, trust.
272
00:13:58,771 --> 00:14:00,339
And that's what you have to do when, when
273
00:14:00,339 --> 00:14:04,009
you're on a path of fundamental physics
or fundamental science
274
00:14:04,243 --> 00:14:06,078
that you're not sure
where it's going to go.
275
00:14:06,078 --> 00:14:08,914
And of course, if you want to get funded
again, you better show something.
276
00:14:08,914 --> 00:14:12,918
Even if it pivots, even if it's something
totally different, it's valuable.
277
00:14:13,252 --> 00:14:16,388
And those grants throughout the years,
there were many programs in AMO and
278
00:14:17,089 --> 00:14:20,259
physics at the information
frontier, and NSF, see really
279
00:14:20,259 --> 00:14:23,462
wanted to capture quantum in ways
that the other agencies really couldn't.
280
00:14:23,462 --> 00:14:26,098
And they, you know,
they largely succeeded in that.
281
00:14:26,098 --> 00:14:30,903
I will say, in the last several years,
one of my heroes at NSF, Bogdan Mihaila,
282
00:14:31,270 --> 00:14:34,273
he realized that we were not just
doing atomic physics,
283
00:14:34,506 --> 00:14:35,875
but we were studying algorithms.
284
00:14:35,875 --> 00:14:39,078
We were designing
algorithms to match with our atoms.
285
00:14:39,078 --> 00:14:43,115
And and that we call it
a vertical research institute.
286
00:14:43,115 --> 00:14:45,618
And that that spawned what we call STAQ.
287
00:14:45,618 --> 00:14:46,785
S-T-A-Q.
288
00:14:46,785 --> 00:14:48,053
Basically, applying quantum
289
00:14:48,053 --> 00:14:51,991
software to a very mature quantum system
that we can engineer.
290
00:14:51,991 --> 00:14:54,226
We it's almost like a user facility.
291
00:14:54,226 --> 00:14:57,029
The way we run this place here
at Duke, at the Duke Quantum Center,
292
00:14:57,029 --> 00:15:00,900
we have so many collaborations
where people run their ideas
293
00:15:01,100 --> 00:15:02,701
through our machines.
294
00:15:02,701 --> 00:15:05,404
It's almost like a company could do that,
but we do it for science.
295
00:15:05,404 --> 00:15:09,842
We're not interested in optimizing
a traveling salesman problem for Amazon.
296
00:15:09,842 --> 00:15:12,144
I mean, we love to do that,
but we're also interested
297
00:15:12,144 --> 00:15:15,881
in studying phase transitions,
simulating correlated matter.
298
00:15:15,881 --> 00:15:18,984
And again, I think NSF really
because of their science basis,
299
00:15:19,351 --> 00:15:22,988
it was a super important part of the US
posture in quantum.
300
00:15:23,222 --> 00:15:26,492
What has been the biggest challenge
translating
301
00:15:26,492 --> 00:15:29,595
research
into more industrial applications.
302
00:15:30,896 --> 00:15:33,098
IonQ by now is a very big company.
303
00:15:33,098 --> 00:15:34,633
And they're a public company.
304
00:15:34,633 --> 00:15:38,971
And with that comes severe challenges
of talking to the street.
305
00:15:39,471 --> 00:15:42,241
I've never thought that job number one
is to
306
00:15:42,241 --> 00:15:45,344
make sure the stock is buoyant,
but I understand that it needs to be.
307
00:15:45,811 --> 00:15:47,813
Otherwise the company doesn't exist.
308
00:15:47,813 --> 00:15:51,083
And so to me, the central challenge is
how do you balance?
309
00:15:51,317 --> 00:15:55,921
I'll sound a cliche, you know, how do you
balance future research and development
310
00:15:56,388 --> 00:16:00,492
with current revenue
and sales and interest in the company?
311
00:16:01,160 --> 00:16:04,163
I’ll never claim to be a businessman
or a,
312
00:16:04,863 --> 00:16:07,967
you know, even though I'm involved
with a company, but you have to have
313
00:16:07,967 --> 00:16:10,970
a little bit of both, and it's
you really shouldn't be all of one
314
00:16:11,437 --> 00:16:12,204
and none of the other.
315
00:16:12,204 --> 00:16:14,840
You can't do 100% research at a company.
316
00:16:14,840 --> 00:16:17,409
People tend not to want to invest in that.
317
00:16:17,409 --> 00:16:21,213
If you have a long term investor, it's
probably not the public that's investing.
318
00:16:21,613 --> 00:16:25,784
If you're only doing, you know,
sales and revenue and you're not looking
319
00:16:25,784 --> 00:16:29,154
in the out years, that's an equal recipe
for disaster in this field.
320
00:16:29,154 --> 00:16:32,157
So to me,
that was the most difficult calculation.
321
00:16:32,458 --> 00:16:35,861
How much to sell and how much to do R&D.
322
00:16:35,861 --> 00:16:38,230
I will add a little short story on that.
323
00:16:38,230 --> 00:16:41,800
I was CEO of the company for about a year,
when we were just starting to produce
324
00:16:41,800 --> 00:16:46,305
our first few systems,
and we started working with AWS,
325
00:16:47,306 --> 00:16:50,309
Amazon Web Services
to put one of our machines on the cloud.
326
00:16:50,642 --> 00:16:54,113
I mean, the great thing about any computer
is that especially a quantum computer,
327
00:16:54,146 --> 00:16:55,347
it doesn't need to be in front of you.
328
00:16:55,347 --> 00:16:57,182
You can use it on the cloud.
329
00:16:57,182 --> 00:17:01,520
And that exercise was tricky because
it meant that we had to run a machine
330
00:17:01,987 --> 00:17:06,658
that would be up 24-7,
and therefore it's not getting any better.
331
00:17:06,725 --> 00:17:07,559
It's just running.
332
00:17:07,559 --> 00:17:10,829
We're not improving things,
and that's not what I'd been used
333
00:17:10,829 --> 00:17:13,832
to, you know, always improving things,
looking at the next thing.
334
00:17:13,899 --> 00:17:17,102
And I was actually sort of against
doing it, putting it in the cloud.
335
00:17:17,102 --> 00:17:19,038
It would also get revenue and that's fine.
336
00:17:19,038 --> 00:17:20,806
The revenue was good.
337
00:17:20,806 --> 00:17:23,642
But I learned later on that it actually
was really important
338
00:17:23,642 --> 00:17:27,980
to build a system that would work 24-7
the engineering behind that.
339
00:17:27,980 --> 00:17:31,150
And, you know, engineering
is something that I don't come natural to.
340
00:17:31,150 --> 00:17:35,254
It's very hard to teach engineering,
systems engineering, but making something
341
00:17:35,254 --> 00:17:40,359
work 24-7 is an exercise
that you will learn the next.
342
00:17:40,459 --> 00:17:43,095
The research systems will benefit
from that.
343
00:17:43,095 --> 00:17:45,197
That was, an interesting lesson
I learned.
344
00:17:45,197 --> 00:17:48,967
So maybe I erred too much on the research
side, I'm not sure, but we ended up
345
00:17:48,967 --> 00:17:50,969
putting them on the cloud,
all of the clouds.
346
00:17:50,969 --> 00:17:54,540
And I think, IonQ and other companies
that do that are much better off
347
00:17:54,540 --> 00:17:55,140
for doing that.
348
00:17:55,140 --> 00:17:57,476
The other kind of business question
I want to ask you
349
00:17:57,476 --> 00:18:00,479
was, can you tell us a little bit
about your experience
350
00:18:00,813 --> 00:18:04,917
making that jump from being a startup
company into a public traded company?
351
00:18:05,884 --> 00:18:07,486
We were sort of lucky in
352
00:18:07,486 --> 00:18:11,356
the timing of this, and
it actually happened right out of Covid
353
00:18:11,623 --> 00:18:15,961
when as a private company,
we'd just raised a bunch of funding
354
00:18:16,395 --> 00:18:19,965
that would give us,
I don't know, maybe a 3 or 4 year
355
00:18:20,132 --> 00:18:23,635
runway, as they say, because we weren't
really bringing in much money.
356
00:18:23,635 --> 00:18:24,770
We were spending it.
357
00:18:24,770 --> 00:18:26,205
And the investors understood this.
358
00:18:26,205 --> 00:18:27,739
This is a long term play.
359
00:18:27,739 --> 00:18:30,943
And when Covid hit our board,
which was largely
360
00:18:31,310 --> 00:18:34,713
our investors, they said, we don't know
how bad this Covid thing is going to be.
361
00:18:34,713 --> 00:18:36,115
You need to really think about that.
362
00:18:36,115 --> 00:18:40,752
3 or 4 years to be 7 or 8 years, is it
maybe there's a recession and so forth.
363
00:18:42,020 --> 00:18:45,157
And the one risk for the company back
then was raising capital.
364
00:18:45,157 --> 00:18:47,793
Really, we weren't too worried
about our technical plan.
365
00:18:47,793 --> 00:18:52,231
It was very solid, not easy, but
we weren't fundamentally worried about it.
366
00:18:52,231 --> 00:18:53,932
We were worried
about having to raise money again.
367
00:18:53,932 --> 00:18:56,401
And that's
that's the bane of startup companies.
368
00:18:56,401 --> 00:18:59,404
With venture capital, you have to
keep raising and you're always out there.
369
00:18:59,671 --> 00:19:04,209
And so when the opportunity came,
a so-called blank check company
370
00:19:04,443 --> 00:19:07,679
also called SPAC,
Special Purpose Acquisition Company,
371
00:19:08,213 --> 00:19:12,651
they have a spot on the stock exchange,
in this case, the New York Stock Exchange.
372
00:19:13,185 --> 00:19:16,722
They have investors with lots of cash,
and they want to plow it
373
00:19:16,722 --> 00:19:19,258
into a particular company
that will become public.
374
00:19:19,258 --> 00:19:21,393
So it's a shortcut to an IPO.
375
00:19:21,393 --> 00:19:25,297
We were sort of lucky that these folks
were very interested in the quantum field,
376
00:19:25,297 --> 00:19:27,099
in our company in particular.
377
00:19:27,099 --> 00:19:30,102
And I was told by the folks
that ran the SPAC
378
00:19:30,302 --> 00:19:34,673
that they wanted a company
that had excellent foundational people
379
00:19:34,907 --> 00:19:39,211
fundamentals, and that was Junsang Kim
and myself in the in the ion trap basics,
380
00:19:39,678 --> 00:19:43,081
you know, largely
riding on decades of mature research
381
00:19:43,415 --> 00:19:45,083
that was ready to be engineered,
382
00:19:45,083 --> 00:19:48,453
but then also the CEO we had
and that was Peter Chapman.
383
00:19:48,453 --> 00:19:51,089
And he he is an excellent salesman.
384
00:19:51,089 --> 00:19:54,159
So we had sort of both parts
what you need to have a company
385
00:19:54,726 --> 00:19:57,462
and our SPACs kind of
I call them benefactors.
386
00:19:57,462 --> 00:20:01,466
It's not the right word, but our sponsors,
they wanted to make a play in quantum,
387
00:20:01,466 --> 00:20:03,068
knowing how risky it was.
388
00:20:03,068 --> 00:20:07,005
But they had a good foundation,
an eye toward revenue and sales as well.
389
00:20:07,472 --> 00:20:09,775
You know, how do you balance that?
That's the tricky thing.
390
00:20:09,775 --> 00:20:11,043
So that was the transition.
391
00:20:11,043 --> 00:20:14,880
And, you know, we started getting more
professional, getting a professional
392
00:20:14,880 --> 00:20:18,550
finance team, legal team, all that stuff
that comes with the public company,
393
00:20:19,218 --> 00:20:21,720
the company was different
after going public for sure.
394
00:20:21,720 --> 00:20:25,591
And I think the pressure you know,
their quarterly stock report earnings
395
00:20:25,891 --> 00:20:28,894
where we talk
directly to investors in the street.
396
00:20:29,528 --> 00:20:31,697
It's still strange those interactions.
397
00:20:31,697 --> 00:20:35,667
But I give the analysts and the investors,
the people on Wall Street
398
00:20:35,667 --> 00:20:36,735
a lot of credit.
399
00:20:36,735 --> 00:20:38,337
They seem to read about this field.
400
00:20:38,337 --> 00:20:41,873
They think quantum will will enhance
AI in the future.
401
00:20:42,341 --> 00:20:46,245
It's a question of time,
I guess, in terms of prosecution
402
00:20:46,245 --> 00:20:49,248
of our technical plan
that just went into hyperdrive
403
00:20:49,348 --> 00:20:52,818
with the public funding,
we were really able to just go crazy
404
00:20:52,818 --> 00:20:56,154
and go much faster,
make more systems, hire a lot of people.
405
00:20:56,755 --> 00:20:58,924
So, you know,
I have to say, you know, it's good timing.
406
00:20:58,924 --> 00:21:02,160
I think it's a little harder to do that
now, but, yeah, it worked out well.
407
00:21:02,227 --> 00:21:02,761
Very cool.
408
00:21:02,761 --> 00:21:06,698
So for my last question,
you said there's a lot of question
409
00:21:06,698 --> 00:21:10,469
for what quantum computing
will ultimately be used for,
410
00:21:10,602 --> 00:21:15,007
but what impacts do you think it will
have on science and society?
411
00:21:17,276 --> 00:21:19,044
Again, taking the long view,
412
00:21:19,044 --> 00:21:23,582
I'm quite sure that we will have quantum
computers decades from now.
413
00:21:23,615 --> 00:21:24,316
For sure.
414
00:21:24,316 --> 00:21:30,188
That will be deployed for certain problems
and the tricky thing there is that the
415
00:21:30,188 --> 00:21:35,661
public largely doesn't know or understand
or care about these new laws of physics.
416
00:21:35,894 --> 00:21:38,897
They really are fundamentally
different laws of physics.
417
00:21:39,431 --> 00:21:44,469
And I think for people to fully appreciate
the power of quantum computers
418
00:21:44,469 --> 00:21:48,206
and to accelerate their use
in different fields, people should be
419
00:21:48,206 --> 00:21:51,643
learning the fundamentals of quantum
even at a young age.
420
00:21:51,643 --> 00:21:55,580
And I do believe
maybe it's more of a hope, but in 50 years
421
00:21:55,981 --> 00:21:58,784
people will have an intuition
for some of these weird things,
422
00:21:58,784 --> 00:22:02,654
like “spooky action at a distance”,
the Einstein quote about entanglement.
423
00:22:02,954 --> 00:22:03,922
They'll have a feel for it.
424
00:22:03,922 --> 00:22:07,926
They'll they'll know that small,
very simple systems, when they're cold
425
00:22:07,926 --> 00:22:12,464
and they're isolated, they,
they behave according to these laws.
426
00:22:12,464 --> 00:22:17,235
So I think that's a total shift in the way
we think about fundamental physics,
427
00:22:17,235 --> 00:22:18,203
for sure.
428
00:22:18,203 --> 00:22:20,972
And maybe it'll be infectious
and hit other fields
429
00:22:20,972 --> 00:22:23,942
from chemistry to more complex
things like in biology.
430
00:22:24,509 --> 00:22:28,313
So I think quantum is not ready
to tackle biological problems.
431
00:22:28,313 --> 00:22:30,115
They’re still way too complicated,
432
00:22:30,115 --> 00:22:34,086
but I am quite sure it will eventually,
and I can say that safely because.
433
00:22:34,086 --> 00:22:37,823
I probably won't be alive
when it hits that level, but
434
00:22:38,123 --> 00:22:41,993
quantum is, in terms
of the entire community of physics.
435
00:22:42,361 --> 00:22:46,264
We all eat and breathe quantum physics,
but it's not so useful
436
00:22:46,264 --> 00:22:47,099
out in the real world.
437
00:22:47,099 --> 00:22:52,270
This is a way to change that, and I think
it also will propel physics overall
438
00:22:52,270 --> 00:22:56,842
as something that is absolutely required
if you want to understand how to compute.
439
00:22:56,842 --> 00:23:00,078
I mean, I guess physics is behind
the transistor, we all know that.
440
00:23:00,078 --> 00:23:02,514
But the model of a transistor
is very easy.
441
00:23:02,514 --> 00:23:03,782
It's like turning on a valve,
442
00:23:03,782 --> 00:23:07,119
a water hose with a valve or something
electronically controlled valve.
443
00:23:07,586 --> 00:23:09,521
You can make models that go far.
444
00:23:09,521 --> 00:23:11,022
You don't have to learn all the physics.
445
00:23:11,022 --> 00:23:12,958
But quantum,
unfortunately, is not like that.
446
00:23:12,958 --> 00:23:14,559
We have nothing. We can turn to.
447
00:23:14,559 --> 00:23:18,663
So I think quantum computing
can be much bigger than just devices.
448
00:23:18,663 --> 00:23:21,666
It can really bring physics to the masses
449
00:23:21,900 --> 00:23:25,704
and get many more people studying physics
and then going on to other things.
450
00:23:25,904 --> 00:23:28,740
Special thanks to Christopher
Monroe and Alexander Cronin.
451
00:23:28,740 --> 00:23:31,710
For the Discovery Files, I'm Nate Pottker.
Watch video versions
452
00:23:31,710 --> 00:23:34,713
of these conversations on our @NSFscience
YouTube channel.
453
00:23:34,946 --> 00:23:38,450
Please subscribe wherever you get podcasts
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454
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455
00:23:42,721 --> 00:23:43,555
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456
00:23:43,555 --> 00:23:46,858
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