SPEAKER_00: welcome today i'm very excited for this all in interview with this week's nobel laureate winner of the nobel prize in physics in 2025 john martinez john welcome to the all in interview

SPEAKER_03: yeah thanks for inviting me um i'm quite excited about this uh this talk and uh you know love to explain to people about you know what this prize is all about all right besties i think that was

SPEAKER_04: another epic discussion people love the interviews i could hear them talk for hours absolutely we

SPEAKER_06: crushed your questions in a minute we are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own

SPEAKER_11: well the nobel prize is the most prestigious honor and particularly in physics that i think can be

SPEAKER_00: awarded you're in the record books it's going to be an incredible ceremony coming up for you maybe we could go back to the beginning in your history i'd love to hear a little bit about you know where'd you grow up and how do you get started with your interest in physics uh well so i uh i grew up in

SPEAKER_03: san pedro california and uh you know grew up there my whole time my my father is a fireman and my mom stayed at home took care of us and um you know through the years i was always interested in science technology i'm going to say one of the things is you know my dad you know actually didn't have a high school education but very smart person he was always building things in the garage various projects so i grew up kind of knowing how to build things which also kind of tells you how things work you

SPEAKER_17: know kind of empirical view you know you know tactical view of how physics works so when i took physics in high school i actually loved it because there was actually some math behind it and concepts and

SPEAKER_03: you know really made sense to me and uh you know i i just really you know fell in love with the subject and then went to uc berkeley and and did pretty well there and enjoyed it uh enjoyed it a lot and then in my uh senior year at uc berkeley i had a class from john clark who was my advisor and found out what he was doing he was just starting to look at these quantum mechanics and electrical devices stuff and it

SPEAKER_17: sounded really interesting for me i guess i have you know i guess i could see maybe when something maybe would would take off so i started the to uh to to do the graduate school work with him you went

SPEAKER_21: to berkeley for graduate school i went to gertri for bachelor school which you're not supposed to do

SPEAKER_00: i was originally a physics and math undergrad at cal okay i changed my major later and actually got my degree in astrophysics there was some upper division math class that really turned me off to math as a major there was just so many proofs it drove me nuts right right and then physics was always exciting but i liked uh working in the astro lab and i worked actually at lawrence berkeley lab oh okay yeah but then you stayed at berkeley and went to grad school right yeah it stayed at berkeley went to grad school

SPEAKER_03: we started this project a couple years into grad school i forget exact date and what was interesting is this was a question that was actually posed by uh professor anthony leggett who won the nobel prize for you know helium three you know physics uh in i think 20 2003 was that superfluid superfluid helium

SPEAKER_11: three yeah that's right so he showed like if you put helium three cold enough it kind of almost has this

SPEAKER_00: new sort of characteristics with the physics and how it moves and how it works well it has a this super

SPEAKER_03: fluid behavior but it has a very complicated behavior because of the more complicated nuclei of the

SPEAKER_36: helium three and this had been discovered and people worked for a while to figure that out and he you

SPEAKER_03: know helped develop the theory for that so he was quite well known very very smart person and although

SPEAKER_17: he won the nobel prize for that okay there's not much helium three physics going on but for the question

SPEAKER_03: that led to our experiment okay there's a huge field and the question was do macroscopic objects behave quantum mechanically okay and this is a macroscopic object might be a small ball in our case it's an electrical circuit with billions of electrons in it billions of atom and is the collective motion of say the ball uh uh quantum mechanical now you know if you think about throwing throwing a ball against the wall it's going to bounce off but if you make the wall thin enough and the ball light enough it'll then

SPEAKER_38: every once in a while tunnel through because of the you know laws of quantum mechanics so um hold on

SPEAKER_11: let's just pause on that for a second i think that's really worth spending a moment on great so when we talk about quantum mechanics when we talk about the relative position or energy or movement

SPEAKER_00: of a particle at the atomic scale as small as an atom or smaller than an atom we have to use kind of probabilities to describe where things are going to be that was what was really kind of the big understanding of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century right is that there's yeah the probability of things being where they are and moving as they're moving there it's not like like deterministic

SPEAKER_44: like we can see with the ball that we throw around when you get very very small things get very fuzzy

SPEAKER_46: and it's very hard so you hit upon upon the key idea here maybe by accident but it's very important

SPEAKER_03: quantum mechanics was developed for the theory of small things you know electrons atoms you know things things that are that are the fundamental the constituents of it but very small and um you know if you take an atom it's made from electron and a nucleus you know classically they attract each other and they would just you know combine together and then atoms basically would have no size why do atoms have size okay that you know that that was one of the the strange things and it's because this atom is kind of not a a point particle i used to say to my kids that the electrons were fuzzy okay and and quantum mechanically it has some wave function and extended you can think of the electrons being all around the nucleus at the same time so um it's just a very strange behavior uh but of small things

SPEAKER_39: uh and of course very important as how atoms work and how we describe nature

SPEAKER_11: so quantum mechanics ultimately became a field that people say is very non-intuitive in terms of

SPEAKER_00: understanding where small small particles are the energy they have where they're moving to and and basically we resolved to figuring out that we had to use these functions it's not just

SPEAKER_01: a single point but it's a distribution it's a whole bunch of places and there's a probability of where the

SPEAKER_00: atom could be or where the electron could be it's also a probability of how fast it might be moving

SPEAKER_15: all of these things become probability functions and you develop a mathematical theory for doing this

SPEAKER_03: that you know takes you until your third year in university to really know enough math to understand that but basically that's right these are forming waves elected waves of the electron so you have kind of a wave an electron around the nucleus describing what the uh the electrons are and these are kind of like standing waves you know it's like hitting the string uh you know a different length strings different tension strings form different notes these vibrations of the electrons around the atom

SPEAKER_11: can vibrate at different frequencies so rather than think about an electron moving around an atom in a pre-described path and i can know where it is at any point in time the right way to think about an

SPEAKER_51: electron around an atom is it's in a wave it's a and it's it's a long there's a wave that describes

SPEAKER_03: kind of where it is and that's right and you have the electron and you have the proton attracting it so the whole wave theory combines all those two and you know gives you a description of how the atom works and quite accurate description too and so one of the other kind of features that

SPEAKER_00: arises from the fact that everything at a micro scale is described by wave functions is that there's a small probability of something kind of extreme or extraordinary happening like the one example is stephen hawking figured out that you could have a particle an antiparticle come out of nowhere in space and the antiparticle goes into the black hole the particle shoots off yeah and that the probability of that happening is so low but it happens enough that the antiparticle actually starts to delete part of a black hole and that's how black holes evaporate and this theory all these interesting things but can you tell us how what quantum tunneling is so this is another one of these sort of features of quantum mechanics that arises from the fact that these things are kind of waves and

SPEAKER_15: probability functions yeah so if you have um if you have an electron just traveling through space

SPEAKER_03: hitting hitting a wall let's say there's a little wave wave packet wave function to it so it's not a single particle it has some extent to it and what happens is that when that particle hits the wall quantum mechanics say there is some amount small amount of this wave function or if you like the particle going through the wall and then to the other side now most of the time it uh it bounces off but every once in a while it goes through and you know this is seen in um uh everyday devices this is not and there's a if you build very small um memory circuit you have to worry about electrons tunneling and with uh charge leaking off your capacitor uh they have magnetic memories that depend on these tunnel junctions so this is a very well-known phenomenon if you make the this barrier this

SPEAKER_50: insulator just the you know 10 20 atoms thick then that's thin enough for it to go through to go through

SPEAKER_11: so this is what's so interesting um you can actually predict the number of electrons that might tunnel

SPEAKER_00: through one of these barriers one of these insulating barriers as they're called over to the other side which really is crazy to think about it's just like walking through walls right yeah that's that's the idea yeah so going back to the story you were sharing you're in grad school right and then leggett proposes this idea maybe you can share a little bit more now that we've got i think a bit of the basics on what was discussed which was zooming out a bit like rather than just think about all of

SPEAKER_01: this happening at a microscopic scale is it possible for it to happen at a bigger scale yeah and again

SPEAKER_03: we've been talking about quantum mechanics as the physics nature at this microscopic atomic scale but the question was if you made a macroscopic object would it obey quantum mechanics also okay and then you know that was the basic question and it turns out that there's a very natural system to look at at looking at an electrical system and look seen for quantum mechanics and electrical system where the currents and voltages of essentially electrical oscillator does it behave like a classical physics or does it behave with this quantum mechanical nature to it and that was the question now it turns out that when you think about quantum mechanics and thinking about well there's the quantum behavior but then at some point you have to measure it which then turns it into a probability there's something called the schrodinger pat the cat paradox where um in the paradox you have a your radioactive decay and then you you let it happen for let's say half of the radioactive decay time and then you say and then in you have already a detector and then a bottle of cyanide which will kill a cat and then do you say you know after some amount of time is the cat in the dead and alive state okay and you know physicists you know and then this is a this good question einstein brought it brought it up or schrodinger brought it up a lot of people uh discussed it uh but elegett pointed out that the reason this is a paradox is you can believe that a macroscopic object like a cat could be in a quantum superposition state and in fact there was no experimental experimental evidence that this could happen and that was his point so um so he said well you know people should be testing this and let's see if

SPEAKER_17: it's true and uh as a as a young graduate student who just you know learned about quantum mechanics and it's like oh that's a really great great question that's something that we should try to do and we should try to do an experiment you know on on the suggested system uh to look for quantum mechanics

SPEAKER_03: and the the original proposal was looking for the tunneling well it turned out to be more than that

SPEAKER_00: but uh the look for tunneling let me just kind of describe another way you know the macroscopic system could be my entire body could i walk through a wall that's right and then the probability of all

SPEAKER_11: of my atoms being in the perfect moment perfect position you know to be able to kind of cross

SPEAKER_00: through the wall is so low it would never happen in this or many other universes

SPEAKER_03: and and that's the problem is that most macroscopic objects when you try to think about the quantum

SPEAKER_00: mechanics that won't happen okay so there's a small probability one electron can cross over a

SPEAKER_01: barrier right the probability that many cross over at once is lower and lower and lower and that makes

SPEAKER_55: it very difficult to see at scale and what what happens is if you look at an electrical circuit

SPEAKER_03: then the parameters become favorable for seeing this kind of macroscopic behavior and okay it's hard to go into the the whole physics of all that but it's basically because you can make a circuit that operates at microwave frequencies so instead of you trying to go through the wall once a second it tries to go through the wall five billion times a second okay and so then it's it's a lot you know more you know you have more chances to go through and uh uh the other thing is just the various parameters that involved in quantum mechanics you know are favorable for seeing

SPEAKER_36: this kind of phenomena you have to do the experiment right but uh it's favorable for doing that so one of the

SPEAKER_11: parts of your experiment you created what's called a josephson junction is that that's correct so this is

SPEAKER_00: two superconductors with a barrier between them right i got really fascinated by superconductors when i was maybe 12 years old i i went and bought a superconducting disc etrium barium copper oxide oh yes yes that's right yeah from the back of popular science and then i went to ucla and i got a jug of liquid nitrogen and then i floated a magnet above the disc yeah yeah because of the meisner effect and i had it at the science fair and i and i did very well with the science fair that year because i showed this really

SPEAKER_11: year was that was that when it was discovered it's been 91 90. okay yeah that was close enough that

SPEAKER_76: that was yeah yeah the hard part is getting the liquid nitrogen but yeah and i had a friend whose

SPEAKER_00: dad was like a doctor at ucla or something like that so he was able to get the liquid nitrogen for our demonstration right yeah that was the hard part okay i've always been fascinated by the physics of superconductors and maybe you can just explain one of these important features of the of superconductors as it relates to kind of resistance and current flow and then we can

SPEAKER_80: talk about your experiment so so what happens is um when a material goes superconducting

SPEAKER_03: all the electrons condense into one state okay now to just to give you an analogy of how it's not a perfect analogy it's a close analogy if you have a normal metal any metal we have at room temperature it's like a gas of electrons it's like you know gas in the air and then when you get below the

SPEAKER_11: superconducting temperature sorry i think we should just explain that so so you have a metal all the electrons are kind of moving around they're they're perturbed they're yeah they're

SPEAKER_84: different energies different states that's right different energies different states

SPEAKER_03: you know there's some firmest statistics not go into that but it's more or less looks like a gas you think of a gas and then when you cool it below you know a certain temperature it then coalesces into let's say a solid like like atoms will and the electrons coalesce into the something the cooper fair cooper pair bcs condensate that's the name where all the electrons are kind of locked together and doing the same thing now the nice thing about that it's not like they're frozen in place but they have a free parameter that allows them all the currents all the electrons to flow in some direction which

SPEAKER_11: is the super current in a superconductor meaning a material that's cool enough that it reaches its superconducting critical temperature right so suddenly all the electrons can still move they can still create

SPEAKER_61: a current but they're moving together like they're in like in my analogy like they're in a solid instead

SPEAKER_03: of the gas and because they're moving together okay then then when you work through all the physics they are not um you know they aren't randomly scattering off things they're just moving together and then you get a super current where for example if you made a ring a superconductor superconductor

SPEAKER_61: that current would basically flow for forever around the ring this is what you saw with the

SPEAKER_00: floating magnet right that's so interesting i've always uh thought and there's obviously been company started around the idea of creating an infinite battery where you could store technically forever electricity because the electrons are just moving around if it's superconducting it can

SPEAKER_15: they can just spin forever around that circuit yeah and people actually do use big superconducting magnets to store energy and when you get an mri that you're in a you're in a liquid helium machine with a super

SPEAKER_03: conducting magnet they charge it up and that magnetic field is basically there forever uh you know waiting for people to go inside it it's kind of strange to be in you're inside this super cold magnet

SPEAKER_11: there but they've designed it very well works well so this josephson junction is two superconductors

SPEAKER_00: they're on either side of a barrier that you create an insulating barrier and then maybe just explain the experiment and what you guys measured and this this was all while you were in grad school right yeah

SPEAKER_03: yeah and and uh and this is uh this joseph junction because the cooper pairs have to tunnel through it but they kind of tunnel through it together without any loss this this actually forms what's called an electrical inductor in circuit in circuits so an inductor is normally a coil a wire that stores energy in this magnetic field here this this just stores energy of the electrons tunneling through here it's so it's a it's something called we call it kinetic inductance and it happens with this but that forms a non-linear inductance and with a capacitor in the circuit that forms an inductor capacitance resonance circuit which is in your old which is like in your radios you have filters of lc resonance circuits to filter your signal and doing things so this is a very common microwave and uh you know radio frequency uh element that you use all the time to make electrical circuits so i just want to simplify that

SPEAKER_00: you have these two superconductors split by this barrier there's some tunneling some of these electrons are actually going through the barrier to the other side and then you can effectively measure all of these different changes as you change the temperature you guys were putting different voltage states into this circuit that you built and what you saw and what you measured and what you demonstrated was that there were these very kind of discrete or specific changes that happened

SPEAKER_01: that basically demonstrated quantum mechanics at scale that's right so so this inductor capacitor

SPEAKER_03: resonator which you just treat as a you know is a charge and a current going through but because it's quantum mechanics there's this wave function to it so there's some uncertainty in these and then given just the way that the simple electrical circuit works you can then demonstrate the quantum mechanics one of the tunneling which is a little bit hard to describe here but you can see tunneling but i think the little bit easier thing maybe easier is to look at the energy levels of this and let me kind of explain that when people discovered you know atomic physics and started doing any doing this they um excited a gas of you know some gas and the light coming out of that gas would be at certain colors of frequency so if you go outside and you have the sodium lamps on these are kind of the yellow lamps you have you know kind of a single frequency coming out of that lamp or nowadays you look at leds there are certain frequencies that come out of that and this is a quantum mechanical effect that see how the electrons travel around the atom there's only certain kind of frequencies that they oscillate out now classically you would expect there to be all different frequencies that spirals around or spirals into the nucleus so that's what you expect

SPEAKER_11: but we saw these discrete frequencies and so by measuring those discrete frequencies you now had proof right there was quantum mechanics happening at a macro scale that that's right and you published this work and was there a lot of attention when you published this work no yeah this was in 1985 86 85 or 8 i actually

SPEAKER_104: forget but 85 or 86. and so was there much attention on this work at the time 80 yeah this was a big

SPEAKER_03: question and people wanted to you know understand that and you know we published it in physical review letters and it got a lot of attention and i think we had a little article in scientific american that was very proud of yeah that wrote about that and uh yeah it was you know it was kind of a kind of

SPEAKER_00: a big deal what did you go on to do at that point was it considered groundbreaking nobel prize winning

SPEAKER_03: work and what was the story at that time when this came out yeah so you know it was an it was an important piece of work and people noticed it but you know if you know we we showed that quantum mechanics worked and quantum mechanics worked on the macro scale which was nice but one could still you know argue well what is it good for what are you going to do and the in fact the secret of an important scientific breakthrough is does it lead to other experiments and other papers and other inventions and the like

SPEAKER_17: and uh that kind of took uh you know many decades to happen because it was so new and people had to do

SPEAKER_03: do that so i would say it was noteworthy at the time but you know not necessarily you know something very nobel prize because it was just kind of you know weird and went off and you know what are you going to do with it but what happened at the time was very interesting and at the end of my thesis time there was a conference in uh uc santa barbara where i came here for the first time yeah and uh they were

SPEAKER_17: talking about this experiment but the very last day the last talk was by richard fineman very well-known physicist the greatest yeah the great yeah right you know right yeah i kind of idolized him and right and right read his his his books and whatever and he was talking about using quantum mechanics for computation which is building a quantum computer yeah so he gave a talk that was you know really kind of amazing i'm going to be honest as a student i i didn't quite catch everything and michelle devere my dear friend said yeah maybe some of the things wasn't quite figured out at the time but afterwards he was absolutely mobbed by people asking him questions because it's so interesting to think about taking this this you know basic law and actually doing computation with it right and i was a graduate student so i was kind of at the outside ring you know you have the professors in close and whatever and i'm just a lowly graduate student so i could hear a little bit but what i what i learned

SPEAKER_76: from this it was a great question and and something that would be kind of worth doing

SPEAKER_17: you know for your your life for your life work because it's so deep and so interesting and maybe

SPEAKER_114: practical and the like so that really motivated me yeah so that big idea is to use quantum

SPEAKER_01: mechanics and these properties of quantum mechanics to do computing yeah that's right and and

SPEAKER_03: i would say uh soon after that other people in the field got a little bit more specific and showed how you would how you would do it and then it was in the early 1990s maybe five years later that peter shore came up with this factoring algorithm to solve a you know a real world problem with it yeah and it took a while to people figure out it was very abstract and you know people weren't quite what you had to do but but like i said i could see that in all of the crowd around fineman asking

SPEAKER_17: them questions that this is the most you know most interesting fundamental question uh you know how to

SPEAKER_03: combine quantum mechanics with doing computation it's really amazing and so you started to do that

SPEAKER_11: with your life's work pretty much you go on to a very good career yeah so my career path um was of

SPEAKER_03: course quantum computing was getting developed and and it took me a while to really get go all in on it okay yeah so um what happened is michelle devere was was from france from cea france went to berkeley

SPEAKER_17: went back i went there as a postdoc and worked with them and they were young and unknown at the time and people was like well you're gonna go to europe and you're not gonna get connected to u.s science but i knew michelle and daniela steve and christian abino the people are working with were absolutely brilliant

SPEAKER_03: okay and they've had a very illustrious uh career so i went over there because i knew that was great and we continued to do experiments on this yeah and then after that i came back to the u.s and i worked for the national institute of standards and technology and it turns out just down the hall from dave wyland and his group who went a nobel prize for atomic physics for you know doing quantum computation and i worked on some with doing experiments on counting electrons and working for metrology and then did other experiments and then in late uh the late 90s i just again went all in on building a quantum computer there was funding available at that time it had progressed enough theoretically

SPEAKER_36: that the u.s government started you know funding this to see if people can do it and so then a couple

SPEAKER_00: years after 2014 i think you ended up at google's quantum lab in santa barbara is that right i was at

SPEAKER_15: ucsb for um 10 years or so which was wonderful and built up the lab to go from very basic things to

SPEAKER_03: building the five and then nine cubit quantum computer and then during that time google got interested and i i kind of decided that although academia was great it would be hard to get the team together and keep them together for a long time to build this complicated machine and google have the money okay yeah so so we went there and we started off fairly small uh mostly from people coming from my ucsb group and then in uh 2019 we published this quantum supremacy experiment with 53 cubits where we made a lot of cubits and we made them really good and you know fast and whatever so that we could run some algorithm mathematical algorithm that um what we produce some output uh that was took you know much much longer on a classical computer to to emulate and do that it was not practical but it was a demonstration of the power of a quantum computer that it worked well just maybe give your

SPEAKER_00: description of a qubit and maybe we can relate you know how do we build these quantum computers from

SPEAKER_01: qubits to the josephson junction and some of the early work you had done that you ended up winning the

SPEAKER_03: prize for so very simply we have a metal wire and a metal wire that gets put together on this josephson junction which represents a an inductor flowing through here and then from this wire to this wire we have a capacitor and then we set that up to oscillate at about five gigahertz cell phone frequencies uh uh you know to to form the qubit okay this oscillating thing and then there's at low temperatures superconductors you know all this magic we can we can get quantum mechanical behavior out of that

SPEAKER_00: and then you can measure that quantum mechanical behavior create a representation and use that to

SPEAKER_03: run your computing that's right what you can do is you put on microwave pulses to change the state of the quantum computer change the way it oscillates and then we connect it to um it's a complicated readout circuitry uh to you know in the end figure out what state it's in okay and then and then you you connect just an array of these and you just use capacitive coupling from you know one one wire to the to the

SPEAKER_61: next one to do to couple them together and it's more complicated than that but that gives you a good

SPEAKER_00: idea and then just to understand your work that you won this nobel prize for that demonstrated this quantum mechanical phenomena at scale is that part of the design of a qubit and the circuitry did that inform that design work or explain it rather yeah yeah it was the very basic simplest circuit

SPEAKER_03: uh you know we were using analog simulators at the time not even i took data with a computer but this is this is far back enough that you know it was very rudimentary and then over the years we just got more sophisticated design by the whole field you know many many people and uh and we were able to put things together in a way to actually build a computer now right that i would say the reason why it's interesting from the nobel prize thing is what it led to and what it led to right now is a thousand maybe several thousand people around the world doing research to build this superconducting quantum computer and and it's just turned into enormous field large number of papers large number of people people selling quantum computers ibm is selling quantum computers people are selling time in the quantum computers and the fact that it was a it was a useful idea okay that led and and and brought into form uh uh all these different experiments ideas and many many people contributed this

SPEAKER_11: i mean it's very interesting and i think just this broad question or observation that sometimes inquisitive minds leads to research that leads to some set of discoveries that are completely not apparent until 40 years later the effect or the impact it may have had yeah on building an industrial

SPEAKER_00: field like there's now quantum computing everyone feels is on the brink of actually achieving what

SPEAKER_01: people have talked about in theory for decades but seems to be getting very close to doing it and yeah

SPEAKER_85: i i can talk on that but i would say um you know this field many other ideas on how to build a quantum

SPEAKER_03: computer has been generated and uh it is very exciting field quite large field and i would say that the science was very very deep too to get these things to work you have to invent lots of different devices you have to think about materials you have to fabricate it build complex control systems engineering and physics is is that to me quite beautiful and and just to tell you a little bit about me um you know i grew up building things and as an experimentalist you know i like to to build instruments you know build experiments to show this and this was kind of the ideal project for me because you know from very early on it was like well let's you know do this great physics but let's also build something and by saying well what do we have to do to build a quantum computer that kind of led me to know what physics we have to test and what are the kinds of things we have to build and that's just the way my mind works i'm much more practically oriented so it was a perfect field for me to get in and that's kind of what you know intuitively led me to you know trying to do this in graduate school and i think it's just so

SPEAKER_36: fascinating the amount of engineering and technology you have to do to make this work

SPEAKER_00: where are we in quantum computing evolution today so what's the state at what point will we have call it generally accessible and generally useful quantum computers that can do all of the amazing things everyone's kind of talked about for decades that one would be able to do so that's right so um

SPEAKER_03: right now we're we're about 50 or 100 qubits for the superconducting case but they they can be fully controlled and run real algorithms and do very complicated things they have a lot of other systems that can do that i think the the newcomer on the block which looks good as neutral atoms where they made big neutral atom systems but they're still working to get the gates controlled really well and the like but what's happened right now is we can run genuine algorithms on that and people have uh you know have ideas they want to run but because these qubits are not perfect okay it's an analog control system and fundamentally these quantum bits have a little bit of error to it a little bit of noise to it you can only run so complicated of a project and it's good enough to write scientific papers and try things out uh every once in a while people say they've done something uh you know uh that's hard to compute and well that's fine but they aren't really big enough to be useful yet they have to get bigger and they have to get better less noise do you have a point of view on the timelines this is everyone's speculation and there's been more hype than reality yeah there's more hype than reality and and uh and it's hard i used to not want to speculate that but since i started a company then i can do that and what we want to do and it's a timeline of many other groups is to do something in let's say in the next 8 10 years something like that but the problem is you know people are predicting 10 years you know for a while now so okay we we have to do that but um i can tell you for what we're doing is that we've identified what are kind of the technology bottlenecks of the current fabric turn ways to make a quantum computer we've written some papers on it and you know we're working with people in the semiconductor industry to manufacture this in a much more cost effective quality way you know the way you make these gpus or something and we think uh you know when we get that to work we can scale up very rapidly

SPEAKER_36: so in in that it's a 10-year time scale something like that in a lot of technically difficult fields like

SPEAKER_00: fusion energy perhaps even quantum computing they're seeing profound acceleration in getting to their crazy big goals on these very big technical projects because of ai is ai starting to play a role in solving some of the engineering material science scaling noise issues that we've seen historically in quantum computing and do you think that there's an acceleration underway in performance improvements

SPEAKER_03: because of ai there there may be um my particular and and there's things we can maybe do modeling and the like we also think what we can do is use the quantum computer and ai together to solve the problems better so that that that's what our theory team is proposing i used to work with google quantum ai that's what they're proposing so there's a general feeling of that my particular view though is that in terms of this control if you don't build your system cleanly enough and you know that the control is clear enough uh you're you're not going to get the the great performance out of it so i'm a little bit old school here and and working on you know building it that way there's certainly some elements where you can use ai you know in the decoding circuit for the the error correction and the like but the one thing to mention to you is that you know these qubits are are naturally very noisy and you can maybe do sometimes a hundred for bad qubits and maybe a thousand maybe few thousand operations before they kind of lose their memory you know you can think of it as like dynamic ram where you have to refresh it well you have to refresh it with error correction and because of that you're talking about a million qubit quantum computers to be general purpose and solve really hard problems there might be some

SPEAKER_61: a million something a million is a good round number for it maybe a little bit more and right now we're at you know a hundred or you know a little bit more than that so we have a ways to go what is your

SPEAKER_11: view on china and the progress that they're making in this technology versus the u.s this is the topic du jour in every field industrial field computing science is where's china at compared to the u.s the

SPEAKER_00: comparisons and everyone's worried about the progress in china versus the u.s and what that means so i can

SPEAKER_03: talk about my own field but when i have read the papers that um duplicated what we did at at google on the quantum supremacy experiment you know they know what they're doing i mean they they go through the theory they talk about a lot of it is very similar to what we're doing but they know what they're doing and they're getting great results and the thing that scares me a little bit is you know last december the google group published the latest results which is really much nicer they made some real improvement but then china soon afterward published something kind of indicating they were you know on par or near par or something to it and you know i'm worried that the chinese government is saying well you can't publish anything until it's in the western press and then you

SPEAKER_149: can you know then it's open and you can talk about it that's precisely what i've heard yeah so so uh

SPEAKER_03: you know i i'm i'm a i'm a little bit uh concerned about that now what we're doing with our our company is we're doing a new generation of fabrication of the devices and i would consider in my my my research we have the simple fabrication with the original papers in 85 and then around 2000 we had more sophisticated fabrication and then for the quantum supremacy experiment we did something even more complicated other groups too but we want to do a similar jump in the fabrication and what's interesting about this is we're going to be using applied materials and the modern fabrication processes that they have which on 300 millimeter tools you know you can't get in china for example right you can get it for cmos and then they're developing we're developing standard processes but you know new recipes and new ways to put it together and we think by doing that we can do a huge leapfrog and then get there faster and get there in a way that you know will protect our lead there's other things we're doing too uh and you know that that's a small part of it but uh you know we think there's a way to um you know really lead the field and uh and we're happy we have good industrial partners of uh applied materials synopsis design tools hewlett-packard enterprise some startups who do the theory work uh so you know we have a good consortium and we want to use all that knowledge and expertise of engineering to make this happen where were you

SPEAKER_11: when you got the news this week that you won the nobel prize and how surprised were you because this

SPEAKER_00: is a 40 year old research effort had anyone given you a call rumor gossip mill saying hey you're on the

SPEAKER_135: list this year potentially being considered so let me uh give you a little bit of the inside story um

SPEAKER_15: you know if you we we've known that this was a important experiment from the beginning we've

SPEAKER_03: attained some other prizes that are you know much less well known and really appreciative of all that and you you what happens is the nobel um um system uh put together uh nobel symposiums where they get together physicists in a certain field which is quantum information and this kind of thing and they they give uh have all the scientists give talks and and they want to kind of check on the vitality of the you know of the field how big is it and then you know also maybe some of the the leaders that maybe think about it you know can they give a good talk would they could be a good representative so um michelle and john and i have been to these uh symposiums before and we kind of

SPEAKER_17: knew you know what was going on you know that at least we were considered and i'll just tell you as a scientist just to be invited to these and be considered is a is a fantastic honor you know and having giving the prize is just so kind of unbelievable that you shouldn't think that way so you know i've known about it for a few years and in fact to be very honest in the past when the dates have come around it's like oh is this gonna happen and then you wake up in the morning and it's like oh it didn't happen and you're kind of down for a day you know it didn't happen this year and

SPEAKER_76: that's a very bad attitude i i don't like that at all and you know you you should not covet some you know insanely difficult uh prize that you know only only goes to a few people so what happened this year

SPEAKER_17: is i kind of worked through this over several years and this year i just kind of forgot about it

SPEAKER_76: okay so i went to bed and then uh and then we got the call at three and my wife answered the phone and found out what happened but um she didn't wake me up right away because she knew if the day was going to be hectic and i needed my sleep to not be grumpy it was nice of her don't want to be grumpy talking it so she woke me up at 5 30 you know as i looked at the computer oh my god you know and then

SPEAKER_17: we had some reporters coming over at six which you know interviewed me you know right when i had found out if half hour after i'd found out and it's it's a it's it's great it's it's a great honor and uh it's

SPEAKER_03: just been really fun and then you know i've been getting a lot of emails from people i've worked with or students i've had in the past congratulating me and you exchange those stories and the like and

SPEAKER_11: it's it's it's kind of a very special time that's great any um science or technology fields that you've been following outside of your core discipline that you think are really exciting i always like to hear

SPEAKER_03: what major kind of thinkers so to be honest i'm just so focused on doing this especially when you start a company you better be focused right so i'm doing that but one of the fields that i find this is someone ben mazin at uc santa barbara is looking for exoplanets and they're using superconducting detectors that are somewhat similar to what we're doing in fact in the 1990s or so i helped this you know helped establish that field with other people and did that for five six seven years uh to do that he's doing in a different way and i really like how you know this instrumentation you know that we've been working on is their quantum devices are are now able to um uh do these astronomy uh detectors and and look for look for these and of course there's so much going on in astronomy these ways days with gravitational detectors and exoplanet searches and it it's just really fascinating to me and again it's very much technology oriented where people are building good detectors this is what i like

SPEAKER_50: okay i like building building instruments so that that's particularly interests me yeah that's great

SPEAKER_00: i mean very exciting field and hopefully we'll develop quantum computers that will help us build materials and technology to help us get there one day so that's right many rungs on the ladder of human progress well congratulations again on winning the nobel prize in physics this year very well deserve it's a fantastic moment enjoy it enjoy the ceremony and we're excited for your continued work

SPEAKER_01: in the field of material quantum computing and thank you yeah and thank you i really enjoyed the

SPEAKER_03: questions and the flow where you were asking questions to explain it at the right level for people and uh i i i really appreciate that this is a great great great great great great great great thank you