A poem for Stephen Hawking

Posted on March 14, 2018 by preskill

Everyone is talking
About Stephen Hawking.
My good friend
Explained how time can end.
And clued us in
On how time can begin.

Always droll,
He spoke about a hole:
“Now, wait a minute, Jack,
A black hole ain’t so black!”

Those immortal words he said,
Which millions now have duly read,
Hit physics like a ton of bricks.
Well, that’s how Stephen got his kicks.

Always grinning through his glasses,
He brought science to the masses,
Displayed a rare capacity
For humor and audacity.

And that’s why, on this somber day,
With relish we can gladly say:
“Thanks, Stephen, for the things you’ve done.
And most of all, thanks for the fun!”

And though there’s more to say, my friend,
This poem, too, must, sadly, end.

Techs in flux & Rock & Roll

Posted on February 27, 2018 by Victor V Albert

Each year, 10000 physicists descend on one of America’s finest inner cities in a ritual known as the American Physical Society’s March Meeting. If you are thinking that this is going to be one big nerd fest, you’re about right. From my experience, the backpacks, poster tubes, non-brand clothing, and distracted looks will be very easy to distinguish among the inhabitants of downtown LA (this year’s location) come next week.

However, with that many physicists, you will find a few trying to make science cool, or at least having fun while they try. One relatively untapped market in my opinion is montages. Take the Imagine Dragons song Believer, whose music video has lead signer Dan Reynolds mostly getting his ass kicked by veteran brawler Dolph Lundgren. Who says that training montages can’t also be for mental training? Sub out Dan for a young graduate student, replace Dolph with an imposing physicist, and substitute boxing with drama about writing equations on paper or a blackboard. Don’t believe it can be cool? I don’t blame you, but science montages have been done before, playing to science’s mystical side. And with sufficient experience, creativity, and money, I believe the sky is the limit.

But back to more concrete things. Having fun while trying to promote science is the main goal of the March Meeting Rock ‘n Roll Physics Sing-Along — a social and outreach event where a band of musicians, mostly scientists attending the meeting, plays well-known songs whose lyrics are substituted for science-themed prose. The audience then sings the new technically oriented lyrics along with the performers. Below is an example with the Smashmouth song I’m a Believer, but we play all kinds of genres, from power ballads to Britney Spears.

This year, we have an especially exciting line-up as we are joined by professional science entertainer, Einstein’s girl Gia Mora! Some of you may remember Gia from her performance with John Preskill at One Entangled Evening. She will join us to perform, among other hits, the funky E=mc^2:

The sing-along is run by the curator of all things related to physics songs, singer and songwriter Prof. Walter F. Smith of Haverford College. Adept at using songs to help teach physics, Walter has carefully collected a database of such songs dating back to the early 20th century; he believes that James Clerk Maxwell may have been the first song parody-er with his version of the lyrics to the Scotch Air Comin’ Thro’ the Rye. You can see James jamming alongside Emmy Noether, Paul Dirac, and Satyendra Bose below to questionable lyrics. The most well-known US physics song pioneer is Harvard grad Tom Lehrer, who recorded his first album in the 50s. Contrary to the general nature of scientists to be constantly worried about preserving their neutral academic self-image, Lehrer tackled edgy topics with creativity and humor.

The sing-along started in 2006, where the only accompaniment was a guitar and bongo, growing into a full rock band later on. The drums were first played by a Soviet-born physicist named Victor, and that has yet to change today despite it being a different person. The rest of the band this year consists of Walter, his wife Marian McKenzie on the flute, Lev Krayzman from Yale on the guitar, Prof. Esa Räsänen from Tampere University of Technology on the bass, Lenny Campanello from the University of Maryland on the keyboard, and of course the talented Gia Mora on voice. We hope that you can join us next week, as this year’s sing-along is sure to be one for the books!

March Meeting Rock-n-Roll Physics Sing-along
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
9:00 PM–10:30 PM
J.W. Marriott Room: Platinum D

See you there!

Glass beads and weak-measurement schemes

Posted on April 23, 2017 by Nicole Yunger Halpern

Richard Feynman fiddled with electronics in a home laboratory, growing up. I fiddled with arts and crafts.¹ I glued popsicle sticks, painted plaques, braided yarn, and designed greeting cards. Of the supplies in my family’s crafts box, I adored the beads most. Of the beads, I favored the glass ones.

I would pour them on the carpet, some weekend afternoons. I’d inherited a hodgepodge: The beads’ sizes, colors, shapes, trimmings, and craftsmanship varied. No property divided the beads into families whose members looked like they belonged together. But divide the beads I tried. I might classify them by color, then subdivide classes by shape. The color and shape groupings precluded me from grouping by size. But, by loosening my original classification and combining members from two classes, I might incorporate trimmings into the categorization. I’d push my classification scheme as far as I could. Then, I’d rake the beads together and reorganize them according to different principles.

Why have I pursued theoretical physics? many people ask. I have many answers. They include “Because I adored organizing craft supplies at age eight.” I craft and organize ideas.

I’ve blogged about the out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC), a signature of how quantum information spreads throughout a many-particle system. Experimentalists want to measure the OTOC, to learn how information spreads. But measuring the OTOC requires tight control over many quantum particles.

I proposed a scheme for measuring the OTOC, with help from Chapman University physicist Justin Dressel. The scheme involves weak measurements. Weak measurements barely disturb the systems measured. (Most measurements of quantum systems disturb the measured systems. So intuited Werner Heisenberg when formulating his uncertainty principle.)

I had little hope for the weak-measurement scheme’s practicality. Consider the stereotypical experimentalist’s response to a stereotypical experimental proposal by a theorist: Oh, sure, we can implement that—in thirty years. Maybe. If the pace of technological development doubles. I expected to file the weak-measurement proposal in the “unfeasible” category.

But experimentalists started collaring me. The scheme sounds reasonable, they said. How many trials would one have to perform? Did the proposal require ancillas, helper systems used to control the measured system? Must each ancilla influence the whole measured system, or could an ancilla interact with just one particle? How did this proposal compare with alternatives?

I met with a cavity-QED² experimentalist and a cold-atoms expert. I talked with postdocs over skype, with heads of labs at Caltech, with grad students in Taiwan, and with John Preskill in his office. I questioned an NMR³ experimentalist over lunch and fielded superconducting-qubit⁴ questions in the sunshine. I read papers, reread papers, and powwowed with Justin.

I wouldn’t have managed half so well without Justin and without Brian Swingle. Brian and coauthors proposed the first OTOC-measurement scheme. He reached out after finding my first OTOC paper.

According to that paper, the OTOC is a moment of a quasiprobability.⁵ How does that quasiprobability look, we wondered? How does it behave? What properties does it have? Our answers appear in a paper we released with Justin this month. We calculate the quasiprobability in two examples, prove properties of the quasiprobability, and argue that the OTOC motivates generalizations of quasiprobability theory. We also enhance the weak-measurement scheme and analyze it.

Amidst that analysis, in a 10 x 6 table, we classify glass beads.

We inventoried our experimental conversations and distilled them. We culled measurement-scheme features analogous to bead size, color, and shape. Each property labels a row in the table. Each measurement scheme labels a column. Each scheme has, I learned, gold flecks and dents, hues and mottling, an angle at which it catches the light.

I’ve kept most of the glass beads that fascinated me at age eight. Some of the beads have dispersed to necklaces, picture frames, and eyeglass leashes. I moved the remnants, a few years ago, to a compartmentalized box. Doesn’t it resemble the table?

That’s why I work at the IQIM.

¹I fiddled in a home laboratory, too, in a garage. But I lived across the street from that garage. I lived two rooms from an arts-and-crafts box.

²Cavity QED consists of light interacting with atoms in a box.

³Lots of nuclei manipulated with magnetic fields. “NMR” stands for “nuclear magnetic resonance.” MRI machines, used to scan brains, rely on NMR.

⁴Superconducting circuits are tiny, cold quantum circuits.

⁵A quasiprobability resembles a probability but behaves more oddly: Probabilities range between zero and one; quasiprobabilities can dip below zero. Think of a moment as like an average.

With thanks to all who questioned me; to all who answered questions of mine; to my wonderful coauthors; and to my parents, who stocked the crafts box.

Here’s one way to get out of a black hole!

Posted on April 3, 2017 by preskill

Two weeks ago I attended an exciting workshop at Stanford, organized by the It from Qubit collaboration, which I covered enthusiastically on Twitter. Many of the talks at the workshop provided fodder for possible blog posts, but one in particular especially struck my fancy. In explaining how to recover information that has fallen into a black hole (under just the right conditions), Juan Maldacena offered a new perspective on a problem that has worried me for many years. I am eagerly awaiting Juan’s paper, with Douglas Stanford and Zhenbin Yang, which will provide more details.

My cell-phone photo of Juan Maldacena lecturing at Stanford, 22 March 2017.

Almost 10 years ago I visited the Perimeter Institute to attend a conference, and by chance was assigned an office shared with Patrick Hayden. Patrick was a professor at McGill at that time, but I knew him well from his years at Caltech as a Sherman Fairchild Prize Fellow, and deeply respected him. Our proximity that week ignited a collaboration which turned out to be one of the most satisfying of my career.

To my surprise, Patrick revealed he had been thinking about black holes, a long-time passion of mine but not previously a research interest of his, and that he had already arrived at a startling insight which would be central to the paper we later wrote together. Patrick wondered what would happen if Alice possessed a black hole which happened to be highly entangled with a quantum computer held by Bob. He imagined Alice throwing a qubit into the black hole, after which Bob would collect the black hole’s Hawking radiation and feed it into his quantum computer for processing. Drawing on his knowledge about quantum communication through noisy channels, Patrick argued that Bob would only need to grab a few qubits from the radiation in order to salvage Alice’s qubit successfully by doing an appropriate quantum computation.

Alice tosses a qubit into a black hole, which is entangled with Bob’s quantum computer. Bob grabs some Hawking radiation, then does a quantum computation to decode Alice’s qubit.

This idea got my adrenaline pumping, stirring a vigorous dialogue. Patrick had initially assumed that the subsystem of the black hole ejected in the Hawking radiation had been randomly chosen, but we eventually decided (based on a simple picture of the quantum computation performed by the black hole) that it should take a time scaling like M log M (where M is the black hole mass expressed in Planck units) for Alice’s qubit to get scrambled up with the rest of her black hole. Only after this scrambling time would her qubit leak out in the Hawking radiation. This time is actually shockingly short, about a millisecond for a solar mass black hole. The best previous estimate for how long it would take for Alice’s qubit to emerge (scaling like M³), had been about 10⁶⁷ years.

This short time scale aroused memories of discussions with Lenny Susskind back in 1993, vividly recreated in Lenny’s engaging book The Black Hole War. Because of the black hole’s peculiar geometry, it seemed conceivable that Bob could distill a copy of Alice’s qubit from the Hawking radiation and then leap into the black hole, joining Alice, who could then toss her copy of the qubit to Bob. It disturbed me that Bob would then hold two perfect copies of Alice’s qubit; I was a quantum information novice at the time, but I knew enough to realize that making a perfect clone of a qubit would violate the rules of quantum mechanics. I proposed to Lenny a possible resolution of this “cloning puzzle”: If Bob has to wait outside the black hole for too long in order to distill Alice’s qubit, then when he finally jumps in it may be too late for Alice’s qubit to catch up to Bob inside the black hole before Bob is destroyed by the powerful gravitational forces inside. Revisiting that scenario, I realized that the scrambling time M log M, though short, was just barely long enough for the story to be self-consistent. It was gratifying that things seemed to fit together so nicely, as though a deep truth were being affirmed.

If Bob decodes the Hawking radiation and then jumps into the black hole, can he acquire two identical copies of Alice’s qubit?

Patrick and I viewed our paper as a welcome opportunity to draw the quantum information and quantum gravity communities closer together, and we wrote it with both audiences in mind. We had fun writing it, adding rhetorical flourishes which we hoped would draw in readers who might otherwise be put off by unfamiliar ideas and terminology.

In their recent work, Juan and his collaborators propose a different way to think about the problem. They stripped down our Hawking radiation decoding scenario to a model so simple that it can be analyzed quite explicitly, yielding a pleasing result. What had worried me so much was that there seemed to be two copies of the same qubit, one carried into the black hole by Alice and the other residing outside the black hole in the Hawking radiation. I was alarmed by the prospect of a rendezvous of the two copies. Maldacena et al. argue that my concern was based on a misconception. There is just one copy, either inside the black hole or outside, but not both. In effect, as Bob extracts his copy of the qubit on the outside, he destroys Alice’s copy on the inside!

To reach this conclusion, several ideas are invoked. First, we analyze the problem in the case where we understand quantum gravity best, the case of a negatively curved spacetime called anti-de Sitter space. In effect, this trick allows us to trap a black hole inside a bottle, which is very advantageous because we can study the physics of the black hole by considering what happens on the walls of the bottle. Second, we envision Bob’s quantum computer as another black hole which is entangled with Alice’s black hole. When two black holes in anti-de Sitter space are entangled, the resulting geometry has a “wormhole” which connects together the interiors of the two black holes. Third, we chose the entangled pair of black holes to be in a very special quantum state, called the “thermofield double” state. This just means that the wormhole connecting the black holes is as short as possible. Fourth, to make the analysis even simpler, we suppose there is just one spatial dimension, which makes it easier to draw a picture of the spacetime. Now each wall of the bottle is just a point in space, with the left wall lying outside Bob’s side of the wormhole, and the right wall lying outside Alice’s side.

An important property of the wormhole is that it is not traversable. That is, when Alice throws her qubit into her black hole and it enters her end of the wormhole, the qubit cannot emerge from the other end. Instead it is stuck inside, unable to get out on either Alice’s side or Bob’s side. Most ways of manipulating the black holes from the outside would just make the wormhole longer and exacerbate the situation, but in a clever recent paper Ping Gao, Daniel Jafferis, and Aron Wall pointed out an exception. We can imagine a quantum wire connecting the left wall and right wall, which simulates a process in which Bob extracts a small amount of Hawking radiation from the right wall (that is, from Alice’s black hole), and carefully deposits it on the left wall (inserting it into Bob’s quantum computer). Gao, Jafferis, and Wall find that this procedure, by altering the trajectories of Alice’s and Bob’s walls, can actually make the wormhole traversable!

(a) A nontraversable wormhole. Alice’s qubit, thrown into the black hole, never reaches Bob. (b) Stealing some Hawking radiation from Alice’s side and inserting it on Bob’s side makes the wormhole traversable. Now Alice’s qubit reaches Bob, who can easily “decode” it.

This picture gives us a beautiful geometric interpretation of the decoding protocol that Patrick and I had described. It is the interaction between Alice’s wall and Bob’s wall that brings Alice’s qubit within Bob’s grasp. By allowing Alice’s qubit to reach Bob at the other end of the wormhole, that interaction suffices to perform Bob’s decoding task, which is especially easy in this case because Bob’s quantum computer was connected to Alice’s black hole by a short wormhole when she threw her qubit inside.

If, after a delay, Bob’s jumps into the black hole, he might find Alice’s qubit inside. But if he does, that qubit cannot be decoded by Bob’s quantum computer. Bob has no way to attain two copies of the qubit.

And what if Bob conducts his daring experiment, in which he decodes Alice’s qubit while still outside the black hole, and then jumps into the black hole to check whether the same qubit is also still inside? The above spacetime diagram contrasts two possible outcomes of Bob’s experiment. After entering the black hole, Alice might throw her qubit toward Bob so he can catch it inside the black hole. But if she does, then the qubit never reaches Bob’s quantum computer, and he won’t be able to decode it from the outside. On the other hand, Alice might allow her qubit to reach Bob’s quantum computer at the other end of the (now traversable) wormhole. But if she does, Bob won’t find the qubit when he enters the black hole. Either way, there is just one copy of the qubit, and no way to clone it. I shouldn’t have been so worried!

Granted, we have only described what happens in an oversimplified model of a black hole, but the lessons learned may be more broadly applicable. The case for broader applicability rests on a highly speculative idea, what Maldacena and Susskind called the ER=EPR conjecture, which I wrote about in this earlier blog post. One consequence of the conjecture is that a black hole highly entangled with a quantum computer is equivalent, after a transformation acting only on the computer, to two black holes connected by a short wormhole (though it might be difficult to actually execute that transformation). The insights of Gao-Jafferis-Wall and Maldacena-Stanford-Yang, together with the ER=EPR viewpoint, indicate that we don’t have to worry about the same quantum information being in two places at once. Quantum mechanics can survive the attack of the clones. Whew!

Thanks to Juan, Douglas, and Lenny for ongoing discussions and correspondence which have helped me to understand their ideas (including a lucid explanation from Douglas at our Caltech group meeting last Wednesday). This story is still unfolding and there will be more to say. These are exciting times!

It’s CHAOS!

Posted on February 19, 2017 by Nicole Yunger Halpern

My brother and I played the video game Sonic the Hedgehog on a Sega Dreamcast. The hero has spiky electric-blue fur and can run at the speed of sound.¹One of us, then the other, would battle monsters. Monster number one oozes onto a dark city street as an aquamarine puddle. The puddle spreads, then surges upward to form limbs and claws.² The limbs splatter when Sonic attacks: Aqua globs rain onto the street.

The monster’s master, Dr. Eggman, has ginger mustachios and a body redolent of his name. He scoffs as the heroes congratulate themselves.

“Fools!” he cries, the pauses in his speech heightening the drama. “[That monster is] CHAOS…the GOD…of DE-STRUC-TION!” His cackle could put a Disney villain to shame.

Dr. Eggman’s outburst comes to mind when anyone asks what topic I’m working on.

“Chaos! And the flow of time, quantum theory, and the loss of information.”

Alexei Kitaev, a Caltech physicist, hooked me on chaos. I TAed his spring-2016 course. The registrar calls the course Ph 219c: Quantum Computation. I call the course Topics that Interest Alexei Kitaev.

“What do you plan to cover?” I asked at the end of winter term.

Topological quantum computation, Alexei replied. How you simulate Hamiltonians with quantum circuits. Or maybe…well, he was thinking of discussing black holes, information, and chaos.

If I’d had a tail, it would have wagged.

“What would you say about black holes?” I asked.

Sonic’s best friend, Tails the fox.

I fwumped down on the couch in Alexei’s office, and Alexei walked to his whiteboard. Scientists first noticed chaos in classical systems. Consider a double pendulum—a pendulum that hangs from the bottom of a pendulum that hangs from, say, a clock face. Imagine pulling the bottom pendulum far to one side, then releasing. The double pendulum will swing, bend, and loop-the-loop like a trapeze artist. Imagine freezing the trapeze artist after an amount $t$ of time.

What if you pulled another double pendulum a hair’s breadth less far? You could let the pendulum swing, wait for a time $t$ , and freeze this pendulum. This pendulum would probably lie far from its brother. This pendulum would probably have been moving with a different speed than its brother, in a different direction, just before the freeze. The double pendulum’s motion changes loads if the initial conditions change slightly. This sensitivity to initial conditions characterizes classical chaos.

A mathematical object $F(t)$ reflects quantum systems’ sensitivities to initial conditions. [Experts: $F(t)$ can evolve as an exponential governed by a Lyapunov-type exponent: $\sim 1 - ({\rm const.})e^{\lambda_{\rm L} t}$ .] $F(t)$ encodes a hypothetical process that snakes back and forth through time. This snaking earned $F(t)$ the name “the out-of-time-ordered correlator” (OTOC). The snaking prevents experimentalists from measuring quantum systems’ OTOCs easily. But experimentalists are trying, because $F(t)$ reveals how quantum information spreads via entanglement. Such entanglement distinguishes black holes, cold atoms, and specially prepared light from everyday, classical systems.

Alexei illustrated, on his whiteboard, the sensitivity to initial conditions.

“In case you’re taking votes about what to cover this spring,” I said, “I vote for chaos.”

We covered chaos. A guest attended one lecture: Beni Yoshida, a former IQIM postdoc. Beni and colleagues had devised quantum error-correcting codes for black holes.³ Beni’s foray into black-hole physics had led him to $F(t)$ . He’d written an OTOC paper that Alexei presented about. Beni presented about a follow-up paper. If I’d had another tail, it would have wagged.

Sonic’s friend has two tails.

Alexei’s course ended. My research shifted to many-body localization (MBL), a quantum phenomenon that stymies the spread of information. OTOC talk burbled beyond my office door.

At the end of the summer, IQIM postdoc Yichen Huang posted on Facebook, “In the past week, five papers (one of which is ours) appeared . . . studying out-of-time-ordered correlators in many-body localized systems.”

I looked down at the MBL calculation I was performing. I looked at my computer screen. I set down my pencil.

“Fine.”

I marched to John Preskill’s office.

The bosses. Of different sorts, of course.

The OTOC kept flaring on my radar, I reported. Maybe the time had come for me to try contributing to the discussion. What might I contribute? What would be interesting?

We kicked around ideas.

“Well,” John ventured, “you’re interested in fluctuation relations, right?”

Something clicked like the “power” button on a video-game console.

Fluctuation relations are equations derived in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. They describe systems driven far from equilibrium, like a DNA strand whose ends you’ve yanked apart. Experimentalists use fluctuation theorems to infer a difficult-to-measure quantity, a difference $\Delta F$ between free energies. Fluctuation relations imply the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law relates to the flow of time and the loss of information.

Time…loss of information…Fluctuation relations smelled like the OTOC. The two had to join together.

I spent the next four days sitting, writing, obsessed. I’d read a paper, three years earlier, that casts a fluctuation relation in terms of a correlator. I unearthed the paper and redid the proof. Could I deform the proof until the paper’s correlator became the out-of-time-ordered correlator?

Apparently. I presented my argument to my research group. John encouraged me to clarify a point: I’d defined a mathematical object $A$ , a probability amplitude. Did $A$ have physical significance? Could anyone measure it? I consulted measurement experts. One identified $A$ as a quasiprobability, a quantum generalization of a probability, used to model light in quantum optics. With the experts’ assistance, I devised two schemes for measuring the quasiprobability.

The result is a fluctuation-like relation that contains the OTOC. The OTOC, the theorem reveals, is a combination of quasiprobabilities. Experimentalists can measure quasiprobabilities with weak measurements, gentle probings that barely disturb the probed system. The theorem suggests two experimental protocols for inferring the difficult-to-measure OTOC, just as fluctuation relations suggest protocols for inferring the difficult-to-measure $\Delta F$ . Just as fluctuation relations cast $\Delta F$ in terms of a characteristic function of a probability distribution, this relation casts $F(t)$ in terms of a characteristic function of a (summed) quasiprobability distribution. Quasiprobabilities reflect entanglement, as the OTOC does.

Collaborators and I are extending this work theoretically and experimentally. How does the quasiprobability look? How does it behave? What mathematical properties does it have? The OTOC is motivating questions not only about our quasiprobability, but also about quasiprobability and weak measurements. We’re pushing toward measuring the OTOC quasiprobability with superconducting qubits or cold atoms.

Chaos has evolved from an enemy to a curiosity, from a god of destruction to an inspiration. I no longer play the electric-blue hedgehog. But I remain electrified.

¹I hadn’t started studying physics, ok?

²Don’t ask me how the liquid’s surface tension rises enough to maintain the limbs’ shapes.

³Black holes obey quantum mechanics. Quantum systems can solve certain problems more quickly than ordinary (classical) computers. Computers make mistakes. We fix mistakes using error-correcting codes. The codes required by quantum computers differ from the codes required by ordinary computers. Systems that contain black holes, we can regard as performing quantum computations. Black-hole systems’ mistakes admit of correction via the code constructed by Beni & co.

Ten finalists selected for film festival “Quantum Shorts”

Posted on February 15, 2017 by spiros

“Crazy enough”, “visually very exciting”, “compelling from the start”, “beautiful cinematography”: this is what members of the Quantum Shorts festival shortlisting panel had to say about films selected for screening. As a member of the panel, and as someone who has experienced the power of visual storytelling firsthand (Anyone Can Quantum, Quantum Is Calling), I was excited to see filmmakers and students from around the world try their hand at interpreting the weirdness of the quantum realm in fresh ways.

The ten shortlisted films were chosen from a total of 203 submissions received during the festival’s 2016 call for entries. Some of the finalists are dramatic, some funny, some abstract. Some are live-action film, some animation. Each is under five minutes long. Find the titles and synopses of the shortlisted films below.

Screenings of the films start February 23 with confirmed events in Waterloo (23 February) and Vancouver (23 February), Canada; Singapore (25-28 February); Glasgow, UK (17 March); and Brisbane, Australia (24 March).

More details can be found at shorts.quantumlah.org, where viewers can also watch the films online
and vote for their favorite to help decide a ‘People’s Choice’ prize. The website also hosts interviews with the filmmakers.

The Quantum Shorts festival is run by the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore with a constellation of prestigious partners including Scientific American magazine and the journal Nature. The festival’s media partners, scientific partners and screening partners span five countries. The Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech is a proud sponsor.

For making the shortlist, the filmmakers receive a $250 award, a one-year digital subscription to Scientific American and certificates.

The festival’s top prize of US $1500 and runner-up prize of US $1000 will now be decided by a panel of eminent judges. The additional People’s Choice prize of $500 will be decided by public vote on the shortlist, with voting open on the festival website until March 26th. Prizes will be announced by the end of March.

Quantum Shorts 2016: FINALISTS

Ampersand

What unites everything on Earth? That we are all ultimately composed of something that is both matter & wave

Submitted by Erin Shea, United States

Approaching Reality

Dancing cats, a watchful observer and a strange co-existence. It’s all you need to understand the essence of quantum mechanics

Submitted by Simone De Liberato, United Kingdom

Bolero

The coin is held fast, but is it heads or tails? As long as the fist remains closed, you are a winner – and a loser

Submitted by Ivan D’Antonio, Italy

Novae

What happens when a massive star reaches the end of its life? Something that goes way beyond the spectacular, according to this cosmic poem about the infinite beauty of a black hole’s birth

Submitted by Thomas Vanz, France

The Guardian

A quantum love triangle, where uncertainty is the only winner

Submitted by Chetan Kotabage, India

The Real Thing

Picking up a beverage shouldn’t be this hard. And it definitely shouldn’t take you through the multiverse…

Submitted by Adam Welch, United States

Together – Parallel Universe

It’s a tale as old as time: boy meets girl, girl is not as interested as boy hoped. So boy builds spaceship and travels through multi-dimensional reality to find the one universe where they can be together

Submitted by Michael Robertson, South Africa

Tom’s Breakfast

This is one of those days when Tom’s morning routine doesn’t go to plan – far from it, in fact. The only question is, can he be philosophical about it?

Submitted by Ben Garfield, United Kingdom

Triangulation

Only imagination can show us the hidden world inside of fundamental particles

Submitted by Vladimir Vlasenko, Ukraine

Whitecap

Dr. David Long has discovered how to turn matter into waveforms. So why shouldn’t he experiment with his own existence?

Submitted by Bernard Ong, United States

Zoe Saldana Answers the Quantum Call

Posted on December 16, 2016 by Jose M Gonzalez Jr

Stephen Hawking & Zoe Saldana try to save Simon Pegg’s cat

Watch Quantum Is Calling with Zoe Saldana, Stephen Hawking, Keanu Reeves, Paul Rudd, Simon Pegg, and John Cho.

We are on the verge of a quantum revolution. Like in the days of the space race, technology has brought an impossibly distant frontier to our doorstep. Just over 17 years ago Michael Crichton wrote a parallel universe-hopping adventure, Timeline, whose fundamental transportation technology required the advent of quantum computing – a concept that was still only theoretical at the time. Today, IBM’s five-quantum bit (or qubit) array is at the fingertips of anyone within reach of the cloud. Google is building a fifty-qubit array. Microsoft is bankrolling a brain trust that will build a quantum computer based on topological qubits. Intel is investing $50 million on spin qubit technology. The UK has announced a £270 million program, and the EU a €1 billion program, to develop quantum technologies. And even more quantum circuits are on the way; the equivalent of competing classes of space shuttles. Only these crafts aren’t meant to travel through space, or even time. They travel through the complete unknown. Qubits fluctuate between the infinite universes of possibility, their quantum states based inherently on uncertainty. And the best way to harness that seemingly unlimited computing power, and take the first steps into the quantum frontier, is through the elusive concept of entanglement.

So then, the quantum crafts are ready; the standby lights on their consoles blinking in a steady yellow cadence. What we’re missing are the curiosity-driven pilots willing to grapple with the uncertain and unpredictable.

The quantum mechanics property of entanglement was discovered by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen and soon after described in a famous 1935 paper. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” Virtually all of his contemporaries, including Edwin Schrödinger who coined the term “entanglement”, and the entire subsequent generation of physicists would struggle with this paradox. Although their struggles would be necessary to arrive at this particular moment in time, this precipice, their collective and prodigious minds were, and remain to be, handcuffed by training and experiences rooted in a classical understanding of the laws of nature – derived from phenomena that can be seen or felt, either directly or indirectly. Quantum entanglement, on the other hand, presents a puzzle of a fundamentally abstract nature.

Paul Rudd & Stephen Hawking chatting it up

When Paul Rudd defeated Stephen Hawking in a game of quantum chess – a game built from the ground up with a quantum mechanical set of moves leveraging superposition and entanglement – our intent was to suggest that an entirely new generation of physicists can emerge with an intuitive understanding of entanglement, even before having to dip their toes in mathematics.

Language, Young Lady

Following up on Anyone Can Quantum, the challenges were to (1) further introduce and elaborate on quantum entanglement and (2) reach a wider audience, particularly women. Coming from a writer’s perspective, my primary concern was to make the abstract concept of entanglement somehow relatable. Popular stories, at their most basic, are told through interactions between people in relationships. Only through relational interactions can characters be challenged enough to affect a change in behavior, and as a result support a theme. Early story concepts evolved from the idea that any interaction with entanglement would result in a primary problem of miscommunication. Entanglement, in any form approaching personification, would be fully alien and incomprehensible. Language then, I decided, would become the fabric by which we could create a set of interactions between a human and entanglement.

Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) & Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) in Arrival

This particular dynamic was tackled in the recent movie Arrival. There, the fictional linguist Dr. Louise Banks is tasked with translating the coffee-ring-stain sign language of a visiting alien civilization before one of the world’s many nervous armies attacks them and causes an intergalactic incident. In the process of decoding the dense script, the controversial Sapir-Whorf theory is brought up introducing the idea that language shapes the way people think. While this theory may or may not hold snow, I am still impressed with the notion that a shared, specific, and descriptive language is necessary to collaborate and innovate. This impression is supported by my own experience in molecular and cell biology research in which communicating new findings always requires expending a tremendous amount of energy crafting a new and appropriate set of terms, or in other words, an expansion of the language.

Marvel To The Rescue

The Tesseract & Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy

To drive their building, multi-threaded Infinity Stones storyline, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has been fortuitously bold in broaching quantum physics concepts and attempting to ground them in real science, taking advantage of the contacts available through the Science & Entertainment Exchange. Through these consultations, movies like Thor and Ant-Man have already delivered to a wide and diverse audience complex concepts such as Einstein-Rosen bridges (wormholes) and the Quantum Realm.

The Ant-Man consultation, in particular, resulted in a relationship between IQIM’s own Spyridon Michalakis (aka Spiros) and Ant-Man himself, Paul Rudd. This relationship was not only responsible for Anyone Can Quantum, but it was also the reason why Spiros was invited to be a panelist at the Silicon Valley Comic Con earlier this year, where he was interviewed by science journalist Zuberoa “Zube” Marcos of the global press outfit, El Pais, a woman who would end up playing a central role in getting Quantum Is Calling off the ground.

Leonard Susskind

Juan Maldacena

So the language of quantum physics was being slowly introduced to a wider, global population thanks to the Marvel films. It occurred to us that we had the opportunity to explain some of the physics concepts brought up by the MCU through the lens of quantum physics, and entanglement in particular. The one element of the MCU storylines that was most attractive to us was the Tesseract and its encased Space Stone. It was the first of the Infinity Stones introduced (in Captain America: The First Avenger) and the one that drove the plot of The Avengers, culminating in the creation of a wormhole over Manhattan. For Spiros, the solution was simple: In order to create wormholes, the exotic matter comprising the Space Stone would likely have to exploit entanglement, as described in a conjecture, dubbed “ER=EPR”, published by Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena in 2013.

The USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) in the Star Trek TOS episode “The Immunity Syndrome”

Finding Our Star

The remaining challenge was to find the right actress to deliver the new story. The earliest version of our story (back in June, 2016) was based on the crew of the Starship Enterprise encountering an alien creature that was the embodiment of entanglement (a.k.a The Flying Spaghetti Monster), a creature that attempted communication with Earthlings by reciting sound bytes originating from past Earth radio transmissions. In this story iteration, Chief communications officer Uhura would have used her skills to translate the monster’s message amidst rising tension (just like in Arrival).

Zoe Saldana as Lt. Nyota Uhura

In the subsequent revisions to the story we had to simplify the script and winnow down the cast. We opted to lean on Zoe Saldana’s Uhura. Her character could take on the role of captain, communications officer, and engineer. Zoe was already widely known across multiple sci-fi franchises featuring aliens (namely Star Trek, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Avatar) and her characters have had to speak in or translate those languages.

Zoe = Script

But before approaching Zoe Saldana – and at that point in time, we had no idea how to go about that – we needed to complete a script. Two other incredible resources were available to us: the voices of Dr. Hawking and Keanu Reeves; and we had to make all three work together in a unique comedy – one that did not squander the involvement of either voice, but also served to elevate the role of Zoe.

Stephen Hawking

Keanu Reeves

Even in the first version of the story it was my intent to have Keanu Reeves provide the voice for entanglement, expressed through the most alien sounding languages I could imagine. To compress the story to fit our budget we were forced to narrow the list of languages to two, and I chose Dothraki and Navajo. The role of Keanu’s character was to test, recruit, and ultimately invite Zoe Saldana to enter and experience entanglement in the Quantum Realm. Dr. Stephen Hawking would be the reluctant guide that helps Zoe interpret the confusing clues embedded within the Dothraki and Navajo to arrive at the ER=EPR conjecture.

As for the riddle itself, I chose to use two poems from Through the Looking Glass (and What Alice Found There), The Walrus and The Carpenter as well as Haddock’s Eyes, as the reference material, so that those savvy enough to solve even half the riddle on their own would have a further clue pointing them to the final answer.

Simon Pegg’s cat, Schrodinger (not his actual cat)

The disappearance of Simon’s cat, Schrödinger, had a tripartite function of (a) presenting an inciting incident that urged Zoe to subject herself to the puzzle-solving trial, which we called the Riddle of the Tesseract, (b) to demonstrate the risk of touching the Tesseract and the gravity of her climactic choice, and (c) invoking Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment to present the idea that, in the Quantum Realm, the cat and Zoe are both dead and alive, an uncertainty.

The story was done. And it looked good on paper. But the script was just a piece of paper unless we got Zoe Saldana to sign on.

Zuberoa Marcos

Zoe = Zube

For weeks, Spiros worked all of his connections only to come up empty. It wasn’t until he mentioned our holy quest to Zube (from El Pais and Silicon Valley Comic Con) during an unrelated Skype session that he had the first glimmer of hope, even kismet. Zube had been working on arranging an interview with Zoe for months, an interview that would be taking place three days later in Atlanta. Without even a second thought, Spiros purchased a plane ticket and was on his way to Atlanta two days later. Watching the interview take place, he heard Zoe answer one of Zube’s question about what kind of technology interested her the most. It was the transporter, the teleportation machine used by the crew of the Enterprise to shift matter to and from surfaces of alien planets. This was precisely the kind of technology we were interested in describing at a quantum level! Realizing this was the opening we needed, Zube nodded over to Spiros and made the introductions.

It turns out Zoe had been fascinated by science fiction since her early childhood, being particularly obsessed with Frank Herbert’s Dune. Moreover, she was interested in playing the role of our lead character. In the weeks that followed, communication proceeded through managers in an attempt to nail down a filming date.

Mariel, Zoe, and Cicely Saldana

The Dangers of Miscommunication

I probably don’t need to remind you that Zoe Saldana is a core component of three gigantic franchises. That means tight schedules, press conferences, and international travel. Ultimately Zoe said that her travel commitments wouldn’t allow her to film our short. It was back to square one. We were dead in the water. The script was just a piece of paper.

However, for some reason, Spiros and Zube were not willing to concede. Zube found out about Zoe Saldana’s production company Cinestar and got in contact with coordinator Diego Gonzalez, to set up a lunch meeting. At lunch, Diego informed Zube and Spiros that Zoe really wanted to do this, but her team was under the impression that filming for our short video had to take place the week Star Trek: Beyond was to be released (Zoe was arguably busier than the POTUS during that week). Spiros informed Cinestar that we would accommodate whatever date Zoe could be available. Having that hurdle removed paved the way for a concrete film date to be set, October 25th. And now the real work began.

Simon Pegg in Shaun of the Dead

Finding Common Language

We had set the story inside Simon Pegg’s house and the script included voice-over dialogue for the superstar, but we had yet to even contact Simon. We had written in a part with Paul Rudd on a voicemail message. And we had also included a sixth character that would knock on the door and force Zoe to make her big decision. On top of that I had incorporated Dothraki and Navajo versions of century-old poems that had yet to be translated into those two languages. While Spiros worked on chasing down the talent, I nervously attempted to make contact with experts in the two languages.

David J. Peterson

I remember watching a video of Prof. David J. Peterson, creator of the Dothraki language for HBO’s Game of Thrones, speaking at Google about the process of crafting the language. Some unknown courage surfaced and I hunted down contact information for the famous linguist. I found an old website of his, an email address, and sent and inquiry at about midnight pacific standard time on October 14th, the day before my birthday. Within 45 minutes David had responded with interest in helping out. I was floored. And I couldn’t help geeking out. But more importantly this meant we would have the most accurate translation humanly possible. And when one is working on behalf of Caltech you definitely feel the pressure to be above reproach, or unsullied ;).

Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Wheeler, a pumpkin, a highlighter & my left arm

Finding a Navajo translator was comparatively difficult. A couple days after receiving Dr. Peterson’s email, I was in Scottsdale, AZ with my brother. I had previously scheduled the trip so that I could be in attendance at a book-signing featuring two of my favorite authors, as a birthday gift to myself. The event was held at the Poisoned Pen bookstore where many other local authors would regularly hold book-signings. While I was geeking out over meeting my favorite writing duo, as well as over my recent interaction with David Peterson, I was also stressed by the pressure to come through on an authentic Navajo translation. My brother urged me to ask the proprietors of the Poisoned Pen for any leads. And wouldn’t you know it, they had recently hosted a book-signing for the author of a Code Talkers book, and she was local. A morning of emails led to Jennifer Wheeler. We had struck gold. Jennifer had recently overseen Navajo translations of Star Wars: A New Hope and Finding Nemo, complete with voice-overs. There was probably nobody more qualified in the world.

Keanu Reeves as Ted “Theodore” Logan in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

So it turns out that Navajo is a much more difficult language to translate and speak than I had anticipated. For instance, there are over a hundred vowel sounds. So even though the translation was in good hands, I would be imposing on Keanu Reeves one of the greatest vocal challenges he would ever undertake. Eventually I arranged to have Jennifer on hand during Keanu’s voice recording. Here’s what he had to record (phonetically):

Tsee /da / a / ko / ho / di / say / tsaa, / a / nee / di

aɫ / tso / n’ / shay / ch’aa / go

Echo Papa Romeo / do / do / chxih / da

Bi / nee / yay / bi / zhay / ho / lo / nee / bay / do / bish / go.

Alex Winter & Zoe Saldana hard at work

Filming Day

After months of planning and weeks of script revisions, filming finally happened at an opulent, palatial residence in the Hollywood Hills (big props to Shaun Maguire and Liana Kadisha for securing the location). Six cats. Three trainers. Lights. Cameras. Zube. Zoe Saldana actually showed up! Along with her sisters, Cinestar, and even John Cho! Spiros had gotten assurances from Simon Pegg that he would lend his name and golden voice so we were able to use the ridiculous “Simon’s Peggs” wood sign that we had crafted just for the shoot. Within a few busy hours we were wrapped. All the cats and props were packed and back in LA traffic, where we all seem to exist more often than not. Now the story was left to the fate of editing and post-production.

In Post

Unlike the circumstances involved with Anyone Can Quantum, for which there was a fast approaching debut date, Spiros and myself actually had time to be an active part of the post-production process. Alex Winter, Trouper Productions, and STITCH graciously involved us through virtually every step.

One thing that became quite apparent through the edits was the lack of a strong conclusion. Zoe’s story was designed to be somewhat open-ended. Although her character arc was meant to reach a conclusion with the decision to enter the Quantum Realm, it was clear that the short still needed a clear resolution.

What Seraph looks like as code in the Matrix Reloaded

Through much debate and workshopping, Spiros and I finally arrived at bookend scenes that took advantage of Keanu Reeve’s emblematic representation of, and inescapable entanglement with, The Matrix. Our ultimate goal is to create stories that reflect the quantum nature of the universe, the underlying quantum code that is the fabric from which all things emerge, exist, and interact. So, in a way, The Matrix wasn’t that far off.

Language Is Fluid

LIQUi|> (“liquid”), or Language-Integrated Quantum Operations, is an architecture, programming language, and tools suite designed for quantum computing that is being developed by the Microsoft team at Quantum Architectures and Computation Group (or QuArC). Admittedly taking a few liberties, on Spiros’s advice I used actual LIQUi|> commands to create a short script that established a gate (or data structure) that I called Alice (which is meant to represent Zoe and her location), created an entanglement between Alice and the Tesseract, then teleported the Tesseract to Alice. You’ll notice that the visual and sound effects are ripped right from The Matrix.

This set up the possibility of adapting Neo’s famous monologue (from the end of the original Matrix) so we could hint that Zoe was somewhere adrift within the quantum code that defines the Quantum Realm. Yes, both Spiros and I were in the studio when Keanu recorded those lines (along with his lines in Dothraki and Navajo). Have I mentioned geeking out yet? An accompanying sequence of matrix code, or digital rain, had to be constructed that could accommodate examples of entanglement-related formulas. As you might have guessed, the equations highlighted in the digital rain at the end of the short are real, most of which came from this paper on emergent space (of which Spiros is a co-author).

Keanu Reeves & Keanu

Listen To Your Friend Keanu Reeves. He’s A Cool Dude.

With only a few days left before our debut date, Simon Pegg, Stephen Hawking and Paul Rudd all came through with their voice-over samples. Everything was then stitched together and the color correction, sound balancing, and visual effects were baked into the final video and phew. Finally, and impossibly, through the collaboration of a small army of unique individuals, the script had become a short movie. And hopefully it has become something unique, funny, and inspiring, especially to any young women (and men) who may be harboring an interest in, or a doubt preventing them from, delving into the quantum realm.

Toward a Coherent US Government Strategy for QIS

Posted on August 21, 2016 by preskill

In an upbeat recent post, Spiros reported some encouraging news about quantum information science from the US National Science and Technology Council. Today I’ll chime in with some further perspective and background.

report-cover-2 The Interagency Working Group on Quantum Information Science (IWG on QIS), which began its work in late 2014, was charged “to assess Federal programs in QIS, monitor the state of the field, provide a forum for interagency coordination and collaboration, and engage in strategic planning of Federal QIS activities and investments.” The IWG recently released a well-crafted report, Advancing Quantum Information Science: National Challenges and Opportunities. The report recommends that “quantum information science be considered a priority for Federal coordination and investment.”

All the major US government agencies supporting QIS were represented on the IWG, which was co-chaired by officials from DOE, NSF, and NIST:

Steve Binkley, who heads the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program in the Department of Energy Office of Science,

Denise Caldwell, who directs the Physics Division of the National Science Foundation,

Carl Williams, Deputy Director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory at the National Institute for Standards and Technology.

Denise and Carl have been effective supporters of QIS over many years of government service. Steve has recently emerged as another eloquent advocate for the field’s promise and importance.

At our request, the three co-chairs fielded questions about the report, with the understanding that their responses would be broadly disseminated. Their comments reinforced the message of the report — that all cognizant agencies favor a “coherent, all-of-government approach to QIS.”

Science funding in the US differs from elsewhere in the world. QIS is a prime example — for over 20 years, various US government agencies, each with its own mission, goals, and culture, have had a stake in QIS research. By providing more options for supporting innovative ideas, the existence of diverse autonomous funding agencies can be a blessing. But it can also be bewildering for scientists seeking support, and it poses challenges for formulating and executing effective national science policy. It’s significant that many different agencies worked together in the IWG, and were able to align with a shared vision.

“I think that everybody in the group has the same goals,” Denise told us. “The nation has a tremendous opportunity here. This is a terrifically important field for all of us involved, and we all want to see it succeed.” Carl added, “All of us believe that this is an area in which the US must be competitive, it is very important for both scientific and technological reasons … The differences [among agencies] are minor.”

Asked about the timing of the IWG and its report, Carl noted the recent trend toward “emerging niche applications” of QIS such as quantum sensors, and Denise remarked that government agencies are responding to a plea from industry for a cross-disciplinary work force broadly trained in QIS. At the same time, Denise emphasized, the IWG recognizes that “there are still many open basic science questions that are important for this field, and we need to focus investment onto these basic science questions, as well as look at investments or opportunities that lead into the first applications.”

DOE’s FY2017 budget request includes $10M to fund a new QIS research program, coordinated with NIST and NSF. Steve explained the thinking behind that request: “There are problems in the physical science space, spanned by DOE Office of Science programs, where quantum computation would be a useful a tool. This is the time to start making investments in that area.” Asked about the longer term commitment of DOE to QIS research, Steve was cautious. “What it will grow into over time is hard to tell — we’re right at the beginning.”

What can the rest of us in the QIS community do to amplify the impact of the report? Carl advised: “All of us should continue getting the excitement of the field out there, [and point to] the potential long term payoffs, whether they be in searches for dark matter or building better clocks or better GPS systems or better sensors. Making everybody aware of all the potential is good for our economy, for our country, and for all of us.”

Taking an even longer view, Denise reminded us that effective advocacy for QIS can get young people “excited about a field they can work in, where they can get jobs, where they can pursue science — that can be critically important. If we all think back to our own beginning careers, at some point in time we got excited about science. And so whatever one can do to excite the next generation about science and technology, with the hope of bringing them into studying and developing careers in this field, to me this is tremendously valuable. ”

All of us in the quantum information science community owe a debt to the IWG for their hard work and eloquent report, and to the agencies they represent for their vision and support. And we are all fortunate to be participating in the early stages of a new quantum revolution. As the IWG report makes clear, the best is yet to come.

Quantum Supremacy: The US gets serious

Posted on July 31, 2016 by spiros

If you have been paying any attention to the news on quantum computing and the evolution of industrial and national efforts towards realizing a scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computer that can tackle problems intractable to current supercomputing capabilities, then you know that something big is stirring throughout the quantum world.

More than 15 years ago, Microsoft decided to jump into the quantum computing business betting big on topological quantum computing as the next big thing. The new website of Microsoft’s Station Q shows that keeping a low profile is no longer an option. This is a sentiment that Google clearly shared, when back in 2013, they decided to promote their new partnership with NASA Ames and D-Wave, known as the Quantum A.I. Lab, through a YouTube video that went viral (disclosure: they do own Youtube.) In fact, IQIM worked with Google at the time to get kids excited about the quantum world by developing qCraft, a mod introducing quantum physics into the world of Minecraft. Then, a few months ago, IBM unveiled the quantum experience website, which captured the public’s imagination by offering a do-it-yourself opportunity to run an algorithm on a 5-qubit quantum chip in the cloud.

But, looking at the opportunities for investment in academic groups working on quantum computing, companies like Microsoft were/are investing heavily in experimental labs across the pond, such as Leo Kowenhoven’s group at TU Delft and Charlie Marcus’ group in Copenhagen, with smaller investments here in the US. This may just reflect the fact that the best efforts to build topological qubits are in Europe, but it still begs the question why a fantastic idea like topologically protected majorana zero modes, by Yale University’s Nick Read and Dmitry Green, which inspired the now famous Majorana wire paper by Alexei Kitaev when he was a researcher at Microsoft’s Redmond research lab, and whose transition from theory to experiment took off with contributions from Maryland and IQIM researchers, was outsourced to European labs for experimental verification and further development. The one example of a large investment in a US academic research group has been Google’s hiring of John Martinis away from UCSB. In fact, John and I met a couple of years ago to discuss investment into his superconducting quantum computing efforts, because government funding for academic efforts to actually build a quantum computer was lacking. China was investing, Canada was investing, Europe went a little crazy, but the US was relying on visionary agencies like IARPA, DARPA and the NSF to foot the bill (without which Physics Frontiers Centers like IQIM wouldn’t be around). In short, there was no top-down policy directive to focus national attention and inter-agency Federal funding on winning the quantum supremacy race.

Until now.

The National Science and Technology Council, which is chaired by the President of the United States and “is the principal means within the executive branch to coordinate science and technology policy across the diverse entities that make up the Federal research and development enterprise”, just released the following report:

Advancing Quantum Information Science: National Challenges and Opportunities

The White House blog post does a good job at describing the high-level view of what the report is about and what the policy recommendations are. There is mention of quantum sensors and metrology, of the promise of quantum computing to material science and basic science, and they even go into the exciting connections between quantum error-correcting codes and emergent spacetime, by IQIM’s Pastawski, et al.

But the big news is that the report recommends significant and sustained investment in Quantum Information Science. The blog post reports that the administration intends “to engage academia, industry, and government in the upcoming months to … exchange views on key needs and opportunities, and consider how to maintain vibrant and robust national ecosystems for QIS research and development and for high-performance computing.”

Personally, I am excited to see how the fierce competition at the academic, industrial and now international level will lead to a race for quantum supremacy. The rivals are all worthy of respect, especially because they are vying for supremacy not just over each other, but over a problem so big and so interesting, that anyone’s success is everyone’s success. After all, anyone can quantum, and if things go according to plan, we will soon have the first generation of kids trained on hourofquantum.com (it doesn’t exist yet), as well as hourofcode.com. Until then, quantum chess and qCraft will have to do.

LIGO: Playing the long game, and winning big!

Posted on February 11, 2016 by preskill

Wow. What a day! And what a story!

Kip Thorne in 1972, around the time MTW was completed.

It is hard for me to believe, but I have been on the Caltech faculty for nearly a third of a century. And when I arrived in 1983, interferometric detection of gravitational waves was already a hot topic of discussion here. At Kip Thorne’s urging, Ron Drever had been recruited to Caltech and was building the 40-meter prototype interferometer (which is still operating as a testbed for future detection technologies). Kip and his colleagues, spurred by Vladimir Braginsky’s insights, had for several years been actively studying the fundamental limits of quantum measurement precision, and how these might impact the search for gravitational waves.

I decided to bone up a bit on the subject, so naturally I pulled down from my shelf the “telephone book” — Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler’s mammoth Gravitation — and browsed Chapter 37 (Detection of Gravitational Wave), for which Kip had been the lead author. The chapter brimmed over with enthusiasm for the subject, but to my surprise interferometers were hardly mentioned. Instead the emphasis was on mechanical bar detectors. These had been pioneered by Joseph Weber, whose efforts in the 1960s had first aroused Kip’s interest in detecting gravitational waves, and by Braginsky.

I sought Kip out for an explanation, and with characteristic clarity and patience he told how his views had evolved. He had realized in the 1970s that a strain sensitivity of order $10^{-21}$ would be needed for a good chance at detection, and after many discussions with colleagues like Drever, Braginsky, and Rai Weiss, he had decided that kind of sensitivity would not be achievable with foreseeable technology using bars.

Ron Drever, who built Caltech’s 40-meter prototype interferometer in the 1980s.

We talked about what would be needed — a kilometer scale detector capable of sensing displacements of $10^{-18}$ meters. I laughed. As he had many times by then, Kip told why this goal was not completely crazy, if there is enough light in an interferometer, which bounces back and forth many times as a waveform passes. Immediately after the discussion ended I went to my desk and did some crude calculations. The numbers kind of worked, but I shook my head, unconvinced. This was going to be a huge undertaking. Success seemed unlikely. Poor Kip!

I’ve never been involved in LIGO, but Kip and I remained friends, and every now and then he would give me the inside scoop on the latest developments (most memorably while walking the streets of London for hours on a beautiful spring evening in 1991). From afar I followed the forced partnership between Caltech and MIT that was forged in the 1980s, and the painful transition from a small project under the leadership of Drever-Thorne-Weiss (great scientists but lacking much needed management expertise) to a large collaboration under a succession of strong leaders, all based at Caltech.

Vladimir Braginsky, who realized that quantum effects constrain gravitational wave detectors.

Vladimir Braginsky, who realized that quantum effects limit the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors.

During 1994-95, I co-chaired a committee formulating a long-range plan for Caltech physics, and we spent more time talking about LIGO than any other issue. Part of our concern was whether a small institution like Caltech could absorb such a large project, which was growing explosively and straining Institute resources. And we also worried about whether LIGO would ultimately succeed. But our biggest worry of all was different — could Caltech remain at the forefront of gravitational wave research so that if and when LIGO hit paydirt we would reap the scientific benefits?

A lot has changed since then. After searching for years we made two crucial new faculty appointments: theorist Yanbei Chen (2007), who provided seminal ideas for improving sensitivity, and experimentalist Rana Adhikari (2006), a magician at the black art of making an interferometer really work. Alan Weinstein transitioned from high energy physics to become a leader of LIGO data analysis. We established a world-class numerical relativity group, now led by Mark Scheel. Staff scientists like Stan Whitcomb also had an essential role, as did longtime Project Manager Gary Sanders. LIGO Directors Robbie Vogt, Barry Barish, Jay Marx, and now Dave Reitze have provided effective and much needed leadership.

Rai Weiss, around the time he conceived LIGO in an amazing 1972 paper.

My closest connection to LIGO arose during the 1998-99 academic year, when Kip asked me to participate in a “QND reading group” he organized. (QND stands for Quantum Non-Demolition, Braginsky’s term for measurements that surpass the naïve quantum limits on measurement precision.) At that time we envisioned that Advanced LIGO would turn on in 2008, yet there were still many questions about how it would achieve the sensitivity required to ensure detection. I took part enthusiastically, and learned a lot, but never contributed any ideas of enduring value. The discussions that year did have positive outcomes, however; leading for example to a seminal paper by Kimble, Levin, Matsko, Thorne, and Vyatchanin on improving precision through squeezing of light. By the end of the year I had gained a much better appreciation of the strength of the LIGO team, and had accepted that Advanced LIGO might actually work!

I once asked Vladimir Braginsky why he spent years working on bar detectors for gravitational waves, while at the same time realizing that fundamental limits on quantum measurement would make successful detection very unlikely. Why wasn’t he trying to build an interferometer already in the 1970s? Braginsky loved to be asked questions like this, and his answer was a long story, told with many dramatic flourishes. The short answer is that he viewed interferometric detection of gravitational waves as too ambitious. A bar detector was something he could build in his lab, while an interferometer of the appropriate scale would be a long-term project involving a much larger, technically diverse team.

Joe Weber, who audaciously believed gravitational waves can be detected on earth.

Joe Weber, whose audacious belief that gravitational waves are detectable on earth inspired Kip Thorne and many others.

Kip’s chapter in MTW ends with section 37.10 (“Looking toward the future”) which concludes with this juicy quote (written almost 45 years ago):

“The technical difficulties to be surmounted in constructing such detectors are enormous. But physicists are ingenious; and with the impetus provided by Joseph Weber’s pioneering work, and with the support of a broad lay public sincerely interested in pioneering in science, all obstacles will surely be overcome.”

That’s what we call vision, folks. You might also call it cockeyed optimism, but without optimism great things would never happen.

Optimism alone is not enough. For something like the detection of gravitational waves, we needed technical ingenuity, wise leadership, lots and lots of persistence, the will to overcome adversity, and ultimately the efforts of hundreds of hard working, talented scientists and engineers. Not to mention the courage displayed by the National Science Foundation in supporting such a risky project for decades.

I have never been prouder than I am today to be part of the Caltech family.

Quantum Frontiers

A blog by the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter @ Caltech

Category Archives: News

A poem for Stephen Hawking

Techs in flux & Rock & Roll

Glass beads and weak-measurement schemes

Here’s one way to get out of a black hole!

It’s CHAOS!

Ten finalists selected for film festival “Quantum Shorts”

Zoe Saldana Answers the Quantum Call

Toward a Coherent US Government Strategy for QIS

Quantum Supremacy: The US gets serious

LIGO: Playing the long game, and winning big!

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