Big Ideas Lab - Quantum Computing

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

What if scientists could use the peculiar world of quantum mechanics to design solutions once thought impossible - changing how we build, heal, and communicate?At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, researchers are developing quantum systems that could help us do just that. These machines think differently, tapping into the strange rules of quantum mechanics to simulate atomic interactions, unlock new materials, and reveal hidden patterns in nature. In this episode, we’ll explore how quantum computers work, why they need to be colder than deep space, and what it will take to bring their full potential to life.-- Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series. Executive Produced by Levi Hanusch.Sound Design, Music Edit and Mix by Daniel Brunelle. Story Editing by Daniel Brunelle. Audio Engineering and Editing by Matthew Powell. Narrated by Matthew Powell. Video Production by Levi Hanusch. Guests featured in this episode (in order of appearance): Yaniv Rosen, Group Leader for the Quantum Coherent Device Physics Group, LLNLKristi Beck, Director, Livermore Center for Quantum ScienceBrought to you in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Imagine a particle that slips through a wall like a ghost. Now imagine two particles, separated by vast distances yet somehow linked, instantly influencing each other states. How about a story with two endings, both true until you turn the final page. A universe where simply looking changes what's real. And a strange rule that says the more often you watch something, the less it moves. These are not thought experiments. This is quantum physics. And for decades it's been the realm of blackboards, chalk dust, and brain melting paradoxes. Usually the first reaction is complete confusion.

But what if we could tame this weirdness? What if we've already started to turning these once impossible phenomena into tools, engines, and maybe computers? In this episode, we dive into the strange new frontier where physics meets information and reality gets rewritten. Cubit by qubit. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab, your exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear untold stories, meet boundary-pushing pioneers, and get unparalleled access inside

the gates. From national security challenges to computing revolutions, discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow today. At first glance, the world makes sense. Apples fall from trees, clocks tick, and light pours through your window on sunny mornings. But if you could shrink yourself down, down, down, smaller than a speck of dust, a thousand times smaller than an atom, you'd find a universe where those simple rules just break.

This is quantum physics, where particles can be in two places at once, slip through solid walls or even lock magnets mysteriously in midair. Down here, reality gets weird. Fast. In quantum mechanics, we want to understand the universe. We want to understand the world. When things get very small, they start interacting through quantum physics.

The story starts a little over a century ago when scientists noticed light and matter behaving in ways that defied logic. Physicist Max Planck was the first to propose that energy comes in tiny chunks, quanta, shattering the old idea that energy was smooth and continuous. Then along came Einstein, who showed that light itself acts like both a wave and a particle. A new physics was born, one where uncertainty rules, and where even measuring something can change what it is.

If you've seen any of the Marvel movies, you know the Quantum Realm is a swirling fantastical place where time bends, reality glitches, and anything seems possible. The Quantum Realm is like its own microscopic universe. To get in there you have to be incredibly small. See, the rules of the quantum realm aren't like they are up here. Everything is unpredictable. Unfortunately, the quantum realm is not based on reality. It would be fun, but it's not based on reality. Yanniv Rosen is the group leader for the Quantum Coherent Device Physics group at Lawrence Livermore. Physics gets really weird when you start getting small.

You don't get people. You don't get little tiny universes. But you get forces that become stronger as you get further away. You get really weird things. Entanglement is one of quantum physics strangest tricks. Two particles can become so intertwined that whatever happens to one instantly affects the other, even if they're separated by galaxies. Their connection defies the usual limits of the universe.

And if that sounds strange, consider quantum tunneling, where particles manage to pass straight through barriers as if slipping through walls that should be impossible to cross. You get very strange things like particles transporting themselves through walls. At the quantum scale, instead of bouncing off barriers, electrons can pass right through them, a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling. The world that we see, you have a wall, you bounce off of it if you run into it. When you start getting small, when you start going into the quantum realm,

electrons can tunnel. If all of this sounds abstract, consider that quantum physics is already stitched into your everyday life. Every LED screen, laser pointer, and transistor in your computer relies on these oddball rules. Even the sunlight that brightens your day originates from quantum processes deep inside the Sun. And now, as scientists and engineers push deeper, they're asking, what if we could harness these strange quantum effects, superposition, entanglement, tunneling, and use them to power a whole new kind of technology? Welcome to the age of quantum computing. and use them to power a whole new kind of technology. Welcome to the age of quantum computing.

A quantum computer is a computer that takes advantage of quantum mechanics to explore possible outcomes faster than a normal classical computer. In classical computing, we have zeros and ones. In quantum computing, we can have zero and one at the same time. In classical computing information is stored as bits. Tiny switches that are either on or off. Ones or zeros. But a quantum bit can be on, off, or both at once through a concept called superposition. These qubits unlock whole new dimensions of possibility. A qubit is the smallest element of quantum information that we can make.

But how can a qubit be both zero and one at the same time? Imagine getting an email with life-changing news. You haven't opened it yet. an email with life-changing news. You haven't opened it yet. In that moment, it exists in a strange limbo, both good news and bad tangled in uncertainty until you click. Imagine a world where simply looking changes what's real.

That's superposition. Superposition means that at the tiniest scales a particle can exist in multiple states at the same time, like being in two places or spinning two ways at once, until it's measured or observed, which forces it to choose just one. Measuring the particle causes the reality to settle on a single outcome. That stores additional pieces of information in how you encode the zero in one state.

And when you start adding more qubits to the system, you exponentially increase the information. Quantum computers rely on using something that we don't see in the world that we inhabit. It's these quantum mechanical phenomena, specifically the ones of superposition and entanglement as the ones that empower our ability to do something differently in computation

than we would be able to do in a classical computer. What these end up meaning is that in the middle of a computation, we can effectively explore more of the possibilities and the possible outcomes than we can in a classical computation. But it's not as simple as swapping out a bit for a qubit. Quantum computers are incredibly sensitive and can only operate in tightly controlled environments. Cubits, the quantum equivalent of computer bits,

can be built in several ways, including superconducting circuits, trapped ions, or even photons of light. Regardless of how they're made, to function properly, most cubits Most qubits must be cooled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, around negative 460 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the case for superconducting circuits. Christy Beck is the director of the Livermore Center for Quantum Science. These are pieces of metal, usually aluminum on sapphire chips that you can hold in your hand, they're maybe a few millimeters. And we cool these down to temperatures that are colder than outer space in order for them to work. And that to me is really crazy that we need to be working at

these super cold temperatures in order to see and use the effects of quantum mechanics. At these ultra-low temperatures, many metals and other materials enter a superconducting state where electricity flows with virtually no resistance and almost no energy is lost. Quantum computers operate using incredibly small amounts of energy, and any loss can corrupt the information they carry. Even slight changes in temperature, noise, or movement can disrupt their calculations. Our qubits get hit by a cosmic ray about once every 10 seconds.

What is the effect on the qubits? That's the environment getting through all of our shielding, getting through everything we're doing to protect it, and still hitting our qubits. So we need to understand what the effects are and how to prevent that from happening. Superconducting qubits also need extreme cold to control photons, the particles of light that carry energy. At room temperature, there are too many microwave photons bouncing around creating noise that drowns out the fragile quantum signals researchers are trying to control.

These qubits are cooled to temperatures colder than deep space. That's cold enough for scientists to isolate and manipulate individual microwave photons, the building blocks of many superconducting qubits, and maintain the quantum effects they need to do meaningful work. While many quantum computers rely on superconducting circuits, there's another fascinating approach to building qubits. Trapped ions. Instead of tiny pieces of metal cooled to near absolute zero, this method uses individual atoms held in place by electromagnetic fields. One thing that

was really really cool for me is when I was actually able to see a single atom with my eye. There's a couple experiments that I've seen with barium atoms where you can trap one or just a few atoms at the focal point of a microscope objective. And it looks kind of like when you go into a dark room, you close your eyes, you wait for a while for your eyes to get dark adapted, kind of the way that you do if you're trying to see the Milky Way in a dark part of the country. There's a sense of awe that comes with glimpsing the hidden layers of the universe. Moments that remind us just how

strange and full of possibility the world can be. But here's the question. Can we turn that wonder into something practical? Can we harness the strangeness of the quantum world to solve real problems in our everyday lives? One of the most promising real-world applications for quantum computing is in the field of medicine. Atomic level control could help simulate how drugs interact with the body, speeding up discovery and making treatments more precise. Down to the atomic level. Some examples include figuring out new biological molecules that may help us develop vaccines. We'll

be able to do chemistry problems that can help us make new materials that are more resilient to wear, that can help us better understand how to make better materials. In nuclear physics, it's exciting because we don't know a lot of nuclear physics. Quantum computers could allow scientists

to model molecular interactions with exceptional precision, reducing the time it takes to develop new medicines from decades to years or even weeks. This level of simulation could lead to faster, more effective, and more targeted treatments. Realizing that potential depends on building systems that can control qubits and connect them to the world we actually live in. How can we make the interface that

connects the qubits to the classical world? We have a quantum world, which is not the Marvel Universe quantum world, but we have a world with particles that tunnel through walls or that can exist or not exist at the same time and We have to connect that to our classical world, which is where we actually live working with quantum systems requires hands-on experimentation and the right tools Lawrence Livermore researchers work with universities, other labs, and industry partners to help improve quantum systems across the board, driving discoveries that others can build on. We give researchers a platform that has the quantum classical transition in it that allows them to go and test quantum mechanics. It allows them to go and test the effects on our qubits.

This platform called the Quantum Design and Integration Testbed or QDIT serves as a hands on environment where scientists can explore how quantum systems behave and how to make them more stable, scalable, and useful. The other thing that the testbed does is it gives people access to quantum computers. So at Lawrence Livermore, we're not trying to commercialize the quantum computers.

Ideally, what we wanna do is to make discoveries that then companies can take and make their quantum computers better. The labs goal is to push science forward Developing new methods and discoveries that others in the field can build on. It's difficult because of quantum mechanics because the information you need to store the information that you have to compute is Exponentially bigger the more atoms you add to the system. But as the number of atoms increases, the information you need to store and process grows exponentially with every atom you add. The requirements can be overwhelming, even for the world's fastest supercomputers.

And so if you take a single atom, we can solve a hydrogen atom fairly well. world's fastest supercomputers in the world, we can calculate the dynamics of maybe a thousand atoms. That's why their team works closely with nuclear physicists, offering them deep access to the quantum hardware from raw calibration data down to the very pulses used in the machines. In exchange, these physicists design algorithms that can handle calculations in nuclear physics

far more efficiently than anything possible before. We have collaborations with nuclear physicists who are trying to run their algorithms on our systems. We can give them access to the very bottom levels of the quantum hardware. We give them access to the pulses that they apply, we give them access to all of the calibration information, we give them access to everything that we have on quantum computers. And in return, they go and design a system that does calculations for nuclear physics really efficiently. So what does the future look like for quantum computing?

We're in a stage where we have this really cool tool that we're developing and we're still trying to figure out where the places that that tool can be applied as opposed to knowing that it can be applied everywhere. Some imagine breakthroughs in drug discovery and new materials. Others talk about tackling complex problems in seconds that would stump today's most powerful supercomputers. There are major implications for cybersecurity and cryptography. Quantum computers could one day crack codes that protect everything from our personal

data to the nation's critical infrastructure. For the US and countries around the world, this technology could reshape the bounds of national security. There is a lot of hype out there surrounding quantum computing. There are a lot of grandiose claims. Everyone is saying it's going to solve the next big problem. We're going to integrate it with 6G. We're going to stick it in airplane nose cones. Quantum computers are still physics experiments. We're making exponential progress on their development, but we do have to be a little patient.

It may be many years, perhaps even decades, before quantum computers move from the lab into our daily lives. For now, despite all the headlines and bold predictions, these machines remain closer to carefully choreographed physics experiments than practical tools. The quantum realm itself still resists easy understanding. Quantum computing has a lot of potential, but it is far away. So in the future, when we have real quantum computers that are working super well, and we're not talking real near term here, we're talking far, far in the

future, we are going to be able to apply them to all sorts of quantum mechanical problems for one, and probably problems that aren't quantum mechanical. It's a world that challenges our intuitions and asks us to imagine logic and causality bent into unfamiliar shapes. And yet, even in this strangeness, there is a real and accelerating progress. Researchers at Livermore and around the globe are inching forward, cooling materials to

near absolute zero, coaxing single atoms into view, learning to nudge photons and electrons at will. With each small step, they bring us closer to a future that's equal part science and mystery. A world where the fundamental weirdness of nature might be put to work solving problems we haven't even dreamed up yet. The possibilities are as strange and wide open as the quantum universe itself. And maybe, just maybe, that's the real promise. Not just new technologies, but new ways of seeing, thinking, and transforming the world. Thanks for listening.