When he was a kid, Shaun Pexton would pore through popular science magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American to keep up with the latest advances in astrophysics or biology. But by the time he was 12 or 13, one particular topic really started to fire his imagination: quantum\u00a0mechanics.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He wasn\u2019t quite sure how it might be relevant to his life at the time, but there was something exciting about this field that evoked scientific mysteries \u2014 the idea of quantum \u201centanglement,\u201d for instance, a phenomenon so critical to the emerging world of quantum computing \u2014 that seemed almost too impossible to\u00a0grasp.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI would always try to find the page that had the word \u2018quantum,\u2019\u201d remembers Pexton, a Yale senior from Silliman College. \u201cThe magazine would have these articles with almost magical diagrams that showed these cool processes. To me it really was magic because it was so distant from what I saw every day. It really pulled me in, in a very real\u00a0sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Pexton, who was born in Hong Kong, grew up in Singapore, but spent his high school years in the U.K., these mysteries became ever more engrossing, and to better understand them he expanded his reading to journal articles and textbooks. When it came time for college he turned his attention to Yale, a university steeped in quantum history, where pioneering researchers have imagined and built the infrastructure for the next generation of quantum technology \u2014 and a seedbed for tech industry\u00a0talent.<\/p>\n
Once he got here, it was like being in a quantum candy\u00a0store.<\/p>\n
And he\u2019s made the most of every opportunity. A double major in Applied Physics and Computer Science, Pexton has taken graduate-level courses with several of the quantum pioneers he admired as a kid. He has collaborated with some of them on research projects (on both the theoretical and hardware sides of quantum). And he\u2019s turned his work into multiple papers \u2014 including one in the top journal in quantum science \u2014 plus a pending\u00a0patent.<\/p>\n
His research has focused specifically on a key hurdle facing quantum computing \u2013 the challenge of correcting errors. In standard computers, the data stored inside the computer is largely insensitive to its surroundings. In quantum computers, however, a slight environmental change for bits of quantum information \u2014 known as qubits \u2014 can trigger a cascade of\u00a0errors.<\/p>\n
When he learned that Aleksander Kubica, a quantum theorist and rising star in quantum error correction, was planning to come to Yale in 2024, Pexton immediately sent him an email, expressing an interest in working with him. Indeed, Kubica welcomed Pexton to join his lab, and for the past two years he\u2019s worked with him on various\u00a0projects.<\/p>\n
Through this work, Pexton hopes to convert elegant quantum theories into systems that can actually work. Quantum error correction, he says, is often framed as a question of abstract mathematics. But his aims are decidedly practical: \u201cI ask, \u2018Can we actually implement this on a physical system?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cWhat does that look like? What are the\u2026hardware\u00a0trade-offs?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When he was a kid, Shaun Pexton would pore through popular science magazines like New Scientist and Scientific…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":645883,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[199,79],"class_list":["post-645882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-physics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/645883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}