The four teams funded by the NSF this month are each taking different technical approaches\u2014the team Tufts is on is using trapped ions, while another is employing stacks of Rydberg atoms. Only one will be chosen to build the quantum computer, work that includes potential funding of $10 million annually for up to 12 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Quantum computers have the potential to solve what are called many body problems\u2014those with many different entities interacting together, so complex that the number of calculations required are beyond the capacity of current computers to process.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re focused on applications in chemistry, high energy physics, nuclear physics, and quantum machine learning or quantum AI,\u201d says Peter Love, professor of physics and computer science and Tufts lead in the program. \u201cExamples would be examining the emergence of structure in matter \u2014going from quarks to protons and neutrons, or\u00a0the emergence of nuclear structure going from nucleons to nuclei, or the structure of molecules from constituent atoms.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Love and his Tufts colleagues will be developing applications that could run on the quantum computer, which requires different approaches than those used with standard computers.<\/p>\n