This award, made on proposal submitted to the Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation solicitation, supports research to design and demonstrate a novel kind of quantum computer.
A quantum computer, if one could be built, would transform information technology by making practical certain specialized computational tasks that would otherwise be impossible with current or foreseeable supercomputers. The most famous application is to the mathematical problem of prime factorization, which is central to code breaking. Code breaking, however, will require a sizable quantum computer performing thousands of operations on thousands of quantum bits. Another promising application is to use a quantum computer to simulate complex quantum systems such as molecules or solid materials, which is notoriously difficult using existing computers. Recent experimental progress suggests that this "quantum simulation" will be one of the first practical applications of a quantum computer. In this joint theoretical-experimental program, the PIs will develop and demonstrate a general purpose quantum simulator built from superconducting electrical circuits. The approach is made possible by recent experimental breakthroughs in the use of solid-state superconducting devices called Josephson junctions, operated at very low temperatures, combined with a new method to operate the quantum simulator that makes interesting applications immediately possible and practical. The PIs envision that, in 10 or 20 years, these general purpose quantum simulators will be stationed at supercomputing centers next to conventional machines and will be made available as an online computational resource for large communities of scientists. Such a resource would make a significant impact in many fields, including: atomic and molecular collisions, cold atomic gases, complex chemical dynamics, low-temperature physics, materials physics, and quantum chemistry.
