Quantum computing is poised to transform information technology and our understanding of information. To participate in the international race to find the best quantum bits (qubits), which are at the heart of any quantum computer, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California have launched a new program to enable UH students to participate in state-of-the-art experimental programs on the continental U.S. that are fundamental to the discovery of qubits.
“It will provide undergraduate students with exposure to qubit design experiments that will influence them to consider going to graduate school in key fields and pave the way for future Department of Energy internships and training,” said Alice Koniges, project lead and graduate faculty in the UH Mānoa Information and Computer Sciences Department. “Math and computational graduate students and their UH advisors will benefit from exposure to experiments as a real-world application of their models.”
The new partnership will focus on experiments related to qubit synthesis, which is creating the building blocks of quantum computers and other quantum technologies. The research team includes Koniges, UH Mānoa Department of Mathematics Professor Monique Chyba, Department of Physics and Astronomy affiliate graduate faculty David Eder, and Thomas Schenkel who is the head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Fusion Science and Ion Beam Technology program.
“We are thrilled at Berkeley Lab about this opportunity to work with UH in this exciting topic area and to support the next generation of scientists in their career development,” Schenkel said. “High energy density science and quantum information science are rapidly developing areas and it is fascinating to bring these topics together here in our new collaboration with experiments, modeling and simulations.”
Funding for this project comes from a new three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, and provides hands-on experimental opportunities for UH students and advances UH’s research in high energy density physics.
Modeling of the experiments will use the PISALE (Pacific Island Structured-Adaptive Mesh Refinement with Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian) code, which is provided by the PISALE code lab led by Koniges. The new collaboration is another application area for PISALE and facilitates exchange of students and faculty between UH and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has groundbreaking experiments that can be modeled with the PISALE code.
