Written by Sir Schwink for Illinois Physics
At The Grainger College of Engineering’s IQUIST quantum testbed, a collaboration of researchers is hard at work assembling quantum processors based on today’s leading quantum bit (qubit) technologies—superconducting circuits and trapped atomic ions.
The state-of-the-art IQUIST quantum testbed is led by Illinois Physics Professors Wolfgang Pfaff and Brian DeMarco and will explore novel ways to hybridize quantum hardware and scale it to high performance systems.
IQUIST—the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center—was launched in 2018 to bring together the diverse expertise at UIUC needed to accelerate the development of quantum science and technologies, to train a quantum-ready workforce for the State of Illinois and the nation, and to build strategic partnerships with industry to develop a robust supply chain for emerging quantum technologies. Although quantum-computing research and development has a growing presence in industry, many open scientific and technological questions remain that are best solved by academic labs. The IQUIST quantum testbed is providing a venue for quantum experts to address problems collaboratively, and even to work with industry partners.
DeMarco comments, “The goal of the IQUIST testbed facility is to build and test small quantum processors for interdisciplinary research and education. We are planning activities that bring together researchers at all stages from leading Illinois programs, including Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics, Materials Science, Mathematics, and more.”
The current plan is for students to access the IQUIST quantum testbed through quantum computing classes, where they write and run small quantum programs. IQUIST welcomes current and future industry partners to take advantage of the testbed once it’s operational, to plug in devices they are developing.
That program will roll out over multiple years. But first, the teams must build and test the devices that exploit quantum mechanics to process information in new ways. At the heart of these processors are qubits (rather than bits) that can store information as a 0, a 1, or as a superposition of a 0 and a 1. Superposition, along with entanglement, are the quantum features that enable quantum computing to solve certain problems more efficiently than conventional high-performance computers.
The trapped-ion architecture is led by DeMarco, who is also the director of the National Science Foundation’s Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Hybrid Quantum Architectures and Networks (QLCI–HQAN), and, along with IBM project manager Kayla Lee, is co-lead of the quantum information thrust of the newly launched IBM–Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute (IIDAI). DeMarco’s team uses strontium atoms as qubits. A primary goal of the NSF QLCI HQAN research program is to investigate distributed quantum information processing architectures and protocols. These systems employ not just one kind of quantum hardware or qubit—instead quantum information is stored, manipulated, and processed using different modalities. Currently, the IQUIST quantum testbed researchers are focusing on trapped-ion and superconducting hardware as the first step.