I'm trying to explain quantum computing in three minutes
I was interested in this competition because I really like sharing ideas of science
and the little moments of insight where an idea makes sense.
There are a lot of weird things going on in quantum physics
so I wanted to share the exciting research.
Every time I try to talk about what I work on to friends who are not in science
I just find it really difficult
and I thought that this might be a good way to get better at that
Good afternoon everyone. Well you are in for a treat.
This is one of our main events of the day the biggest event.
We are now at the finals of the world's first Quantum Matters Science Communication Competition!
So the challenge is
to see who does the best job
at making a three-minute talk
that explains some aspect of quantum science or technology to a family audience.
And we want you to help us decide the winner.
Now in addition to audience choice prize
we also have a distinguished panel of expert judges here with us today
who will help us crown
a Quantum Matters Competition champion.
So let's go ahead and begin.
I feel like I have to try to make it sort of like a performance
whereas normally in science people will tolerate it
if you're not really that great at presenting.
I've put a lots of hours into preparing for this.
It's fairly hard to sort of
condense everything into just three minutes.
A little nervous
but I think the warm-up session definitely helped
so I'm feeling a bit better.
I did at practice a lot
but I hope to finish in three minutes.
[Applause]
I'm going to begin by introducing finalist number one.
She is an undergraduate, a senior at Harvard University
majoring in physics and computer science
and in the fall she's going to be starting a PhD program at Stanford University.
And you'll see in just a moment she has quite a sweet tooth.
Let's put our hands together to welcome
Jessica Pointing to the stage.
[Applause]
Quantum computing.
I have a bag with 100 balls.
Each ball has a unique number from 1 to 100.
I want to find the ball number 3.
Well on a normal computer you'd have to pick up a ball check whether it's the number 3
and then continue until you find the number, huh.
This could take up to 100 tries if I have 100 balls.
But on a quantum computer,
a new type of computer,
you could do this in at most 8 tries.
And there are other problems that we can solve significantly faster on quantum computers.
How is this possible?
Well that's because quantum computers are different
at the fundamental level.
Normal computers process and store information in bits, zeros and ones.
Raise your hand if you like frosted doughnuts.
Okay, me too.
So zeros and ones are just two states
like the two sides of this doughnut.
Let's say the frosted side is equivalent to one
and the plain side is equivalent to zero.
Quantum computers however use quantum bits instead of bits.
Quantum bits, also known as quits,
can be zero, they can be one
but they can also be a superposition of zero and one.
A superposition is like a spinning doughnut.
When it's spinning it's neither on its frosted side
and it's neither on its plain side.
But how do we actually put this qubit into superposition?
Well we can use quantum gates,
which perform operations on our qubits.
So this is a quantum gate called the Hadamard gate.
If my qubit is on the plain side I can put it through the Hadamard gate so that it ends up spinning.
And now it's in superposition.
And there are other quantum gates
that perform different types of operations on our qubits.
And when we put multiple of these quantum gates
together in special ways like this
you can create a quantum algorithm,
which is a set of instructions that you can run on a quantum computer.
And these quantum algorithms
take advantage of superposition
and other quantum effects to work faster.
So this is an example of a quantum algorithm called Grover's search.
This is the algorithm that can search for the ball 3 faster.
So with quantum computers and quantum algorithms,
problems that could take billions of years to solve
could be solved in just seconds on a quantum computer
We could use these quantum algorithms to advance artificial intelligence, to design new materials,
and discover new medicines.
The future is quantum. Thank you.
[Applause]
Let's hear it for Jessica pointing! [Applause]
That was great Jessica, thank you. [Applause]
I think you went ok (laughing).
People raised their hand when I ask them
if they like frosted doughnuts, so that's a good sign.
Our next finalist finalist number two
is a graduate student
at Harvard University working in quantum optics
and he is developing new quantum information technologies
using color centers in tiny diamond crystals.
So when he's not in the lab one of his favorite things
to do is go for a walk in the woods.
Please put your hands together and welcome
welcome Srujan Meesala to the stage!
[Applause]
Let me take you to a place where April is warmer.
My story begins with the fireflies in this forest
and ends with an idea
that could make computers more powerful than ever.
Now believe it or not the flickering patterns
these fireflies are showing you
are actually very similar to what happens
on chips inside computers phones and Play Stations.
A computer chip is a very complicated object
but the building block for it is something
we all know and understand really well
it's just a switch.
Now the switch can either be on or off like the firefly
so we say it holds one bit of information.
Computer chips have billions of connected bits
and the algorithms, the apps and games,
that you run on them
take these switches through multiple on/off patterns
specific on-off patterns.
Now keep that in mind because
I'm going to walk you now into a more mysterious forest.
This is the land of quantum physics.
Here we have switches that can be on and off at the same time.
Remember we're not talking about two switches
or just one that flips very fast.
This is literally a combination of the on position
and the off position.
We call it a superposition.
Now of course the fireflies and switches
in our daily lives don't do that
and that's because quantum physics
applies only to the tiniest things
like atoms which make up all of matter
or photons which are particles of light.
Today I'm depicting these with fireflies.
Now what if you had not one but two bits, best friends.
These two can at any time
be in one of these four patterns
in the usual forest
but in the quantum forest
superposition lets them be in all four patterns
at the same time.
If you had some more bits
say a little village of sixty of them
the number of patterns becomes a quintillion.
Now that's a ridiculously big number
but it turns out there are many problems
related to inventing new materials and medicines
which need computers to process s uch an impossibly big number of patterns.
The trouble with computers today
they have billions of bits
but only in one pattern at any time.
Just 60 quantum bits on the other hand
have enough pattern information
to fill up 18 million regular computer memories
and that's why we're playing with quantum bits in our labs these days
encoding them in atoms and photons
trying to make superpositions that could one day make us the most powerful computers.
Thank you.
[Applause]
I think it went well.
I was a bit nervous
but I think just looking at the kids in the audience
made me feel like I was doing this for fun.
And now I'd like to introduce finalist number three.
She is a graduate student in physics
and quantum science at Harvard University
and she works with ultra-thin 2D materials
and she studies their special topological properties.
Now she actually grew up close by
She's from Newton Massachusetts
and she told us that she re members coming here to the Museum of Science when she was a kid.
So please put your hands together to
welcome Rebecca Engelke to the stage!
[Applause]
Electronic devices like our phones and computers
are getting more powerful
but also getting smaller.
As we continue to shrink this technology
we're getting close to the quantum scale
the scale of single electrons
and we can't just make the same type of circuits but smaller
we're going to need new designs based on different physics.
All these devices are made up of electrons
flowing through wires of conductive material.
In theory all electrons make it through.
but in reality
there are dirt and imperfections in materials
that can bounce some electrons out of their path
meaning energy and information is getting lost.
If we want to work with single electrons this becomes a big problem.
To study the conduction of a material
we look at its behavior over a range of energies.
At the quantum level
even a conductive material has a gap,
energies at which it can't conduct,
and its conductive energies are called bands
and the science of materials is all about designing
or discovering materials that have bands and gaps where we want them.
If we want this material to conduct
we could do so by closing the gap
like this
but this is not the best way to close a gap
because if we look over here where this piece of dirt is
that can distort the bands
and cause the gap to open back up
meaning it can't conduct anymore.
There's actually a better way to close a gap
and that involves the concept of topology.
Topology is a field of math that describes what shapes
can and cannot be smoothly transformed into each other.
To say that two things have different topologies
means that to turn one into the other
you have to do something drastic
like cut a hole in one of the shapes.
For example suppose I gave you two links of a chain
and I come back a day later
and find that they're unlinked.
I know nothing about what you did all day
but I do know one thing
I know that at some point you did something drastic to one of the loops
you pried it open.
Linked loops and unlinked loops have different topologies
and the power of topology is that it allows me to know
that this intermediate state happened.
Here I have two materials with different topologies
which I know because the second material
the positions of the orange and blue bands are swapped.
if I try to put these materials into contact
the bands want to smoothly connect
but to do so they have to do something drastic
they have to pass through each other and close the gap
which means that there's ability to conduct right there.
The important thing
is that if I look where this piece of dirt is
the dirt causes the bands to become distorted
but they still have to cross so there's still conduction
even if it's a little off to the right.
So an electron will find a conductive path through this material no matter what.
To compare, in a normal material
dirt causes the electron to bounce out of its path
but at the junction of two topologies
all the electrons can make it through.
In my research I've worked with this material
in which the dark and light triangles
are two different topologies.
Topological materials are an exciting way
to control electrons down to the smallest scales.
Thank you.
[Applause]
I think it went pretty well.
It was fun to see an audience
out there in front of me listening.
And now our last finalist
finalist number four.
He grew up in South Korea
but he visited Boston as a teenager
and he he visited MIT and he decided then and there
that he wanted to come back to MIT as a graduate student
and so he has.
He's a graduate student in the chemistry department
where he's engineering new ways to induce strong interactions between beams of light
and that has applications in quantum computing.
And you'll see in a moment
he's also quite a Star Wars fan.
Put your hands together
to welcome Joseph Yoon to the stage!
[Applause]
[Music]
This is my favorite scene from Star Wars
the lightsaber duel.
I always wanted to have a real lightsaber like this
and wondered how to make one.
Today I'd like to tell you how to make a lightsaber
using quantum properties of light.
So let's first take a look
into the properties of lightsabers.
First a lightsaber must be able to cut through materials
like trees in this movie.
How can you achieve this in real world?
Well a powerful laser beam
can already cut through steel
like a razor blade or a saw blade
so we can achieve this.
Second a lightsaber has a finite length.
Normally if you shine a laser beam
it just propagates forever
but if you use two mirrors to trap light you can do this.
However the third one is tricky.
Lightsabers they they clash they repel each other
but light normally doesn't do this.
This is because normally light beams
pass through each other
so in principle we cannot make a lightsaber.
However, quantum physicists have figured out a way to make light beams repel each other.
So we've put a single atom between two mirrors
and then turn this lightsaber on
so that this atom gets excited and becomes larger
and then we prepared another one, lightsaber two
and then surprisingly these two repel each other.
So we can go back to the list and check this off.
So we can effectively make a lightsaber in a lab
but we don't want to use it to battle our enemies.
So we think it will be useful in another way.
So we are taking it one step further
to have one control the other.
If we cross the two lightsabers
and turn the lightsaber one on
then the second one cannot be turned on
or if the first one is off
then the second one works again.
This means that lightsaber one
can switch the lightsaber two on or off
and this can be used to make a computer
because computers are made of millions of electrical switches
that can be turned on or off
but the problem is this is very inefficient.
When electrons go through wires they generate heat
and that's why our computers get hot.
On the other hand, light switches
they're much faster and much cooler
and importantly
they are key elements of quantum computers.
So it will allow us to solve problems
that are out of reach today.
So that's how quantum physicists are working hard to implement their lightsabers into quantum computers.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]
I think it went very well.
The audience liked it.
They especially liked the lightsaber analogy.
So now that we've heard all of these fabulous talks
it's time for our judges to go off to deliberate.
I'm blown away.
They're taking these very very difficult concepts
they're making them seemingly simple and enchanting.
I thought that they tackled some pretty tough stuff
and they did a pretty good job of explaining it.
Yeah, these presentations were excellent
I've never been able to explain anything
in less than an hour.
This is what I do for a living
so to do it in three minutes was very very impressive.
I think it's gonna be very difficult to make any choices.
And now it's your turn.
Your turn to text in your vote for the Audience Choice winner.
[Child's name] looked at the stage and said
"you know I didn't think it would be so interesting listening to all the stories but it really was."
They were really good talks.
I feel like I understand more quantum mechanics now.
[Music]
So there's less than a minute left to get in your text votes.
[Music]
And there we have it.
Time is up.
I checked the audience choice tallies.
Are you ready to hear?
[Applause]
Okay, well I am absolutely delighted to announce the
Audience Choice winner for the world's first Quantum Matters Science Communication Competition is
[Drumroll]
Jessica Pointing!
[Applause]
Congratulations Jessica.
Let's make sure we get a photo with your certificate.
Let's give a big round of applause for Jessica Pointing our Audience Choice Quantum Matters winner.
[Applause]
So I understand the judges have come to a consensus.
So, Professor Joe Checkelsky,
was it a difficult decision?
Yes it was very difficult.
It was very hard to decide.
We talked over and over
but finally had to come up with a decision, yes.
Do you have any general comments for the competitors?
Yeah, you guys did an excellent job.
I don't know how you could fit so much into three minutes.
The visuals, I was very impressed with
but then your ability to communicate slowly and clearly
is something I myself aspire to.
But I thought also were very creative
in the way you decided to show off some of the really exotic quantum behavior.
Well thank you so much Joe.
Everyone's on the edge of their seats to find out who is the first- place winner of our competition.
The winner of the world's first Quantum Matters Science Communication Competition is
[Drumroll]
Srujan Meeslal!
[Applause]
Congratulations Srujan.
[Applause]
Well I just took a picture of the screen
to send to my mom
because I think it's the closest I'll ever come to being on reality TV so.
Come on up all of our finalists up on stage.
Let's give them a round of applause
for doing a fabulous job!
[Applause!]
And we want to thank our distinguished panel of judges
would you please stand up?
Thank you so much for judging our competition.
Have a fabulous rest of the day here at the Museum. Thanks.
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