The four teams funded by the NSF this month are each taking different technical approaches—the 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.
Quantum computers have the potential to solve what are called many body problems—those with many different entities interacting together, so complex that the number of calculations required are beyond the capacity of current computers to process.
“We’re focused on applications in chemistry, high energy physics, nuclear physics, and quantum machine learning or quantum AI,” says Peter Love, professor of physics and computer science and Tufts lead in the program. “Examples would be examining the emergence of structure in matter —going from quarks to protons and neutrons, or the emergence of nuclear structure going from nucleons to nuclei, or the structure of molecules from constituent atoms.”
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.
The NSF’s National Quantum Virtual Laboratory initiative “is an ambitious effort to accelerate the development of useful quantum technologies by providing researchers anywhere in the U.S. with access to specialized resources,” the agency said.
Love notes that the NSF “is a huge supporter of science,” usually through grants to individual researchers, but also has led major scientific innovations, such as gravitational wave detectors (LIGO), which “had an amazing scientific impact,” he says.
“NSF has a long history of creating scientific instruments that seemed impossible when they were first conceived,” says Love, a co-principal investigator on the NSF project. “NSF is the right place to develop a quantum computer that will be a tremendous scientific instrument for studying quantum phenomena from quarks to molecules.”