In the basement of Willamette Hall on the University of Oregon Eugene campus, physicists are at work studying how to expand the capabilities of an advanced computing system that could be the key to new scientific frontiers.
The College of Arts and Sciences physicists are part of a US Department of Defense three-year research endeavor — funded for $1.245 million — with the University of California, Los Angeles and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Researchers at these universities are tasked with improving the function of quantum computers to make them effective tools for research. If they can increase their reliability for accurate computation, they could be used to lead scientific discoveries in the near future.
—Jameson O’Reilly, Postdoctoral Researcher, Manager of the Oregon Ions Group
“Classical computers — those that we now use every day — allowed us to study so many problems we couldn't tackle before,” said Jameson O’Reilly, a postdoctoral researcher who is managing the Oregon Ions Group. “The hope is that quantum computers will do something similar, at least for like, a quantum class of problems.”
The Oregon Ions Group is a research lab led by CAS faculty members 2012 Nobel Prize recipient and Philip H. Knight Distinguished Research Chair David Wineland and physics assistant professor David Allcock. O’Reilly is leading the lab while Allcock is on leave working as a scientific advisor for the UK-based startup company Oxford Ionics.
Unlike classical computing, which can be used for a variety of purposes, from streaming videos to making climate predictions, quantum computing is based upon the principles of quantum physics. The theory is a quantum computer can quickly open new doors for more powerful computing power and perform complex calculations that a classical computer would take longer to do.
What’s possible through quantum computing is still uncertain, but O’Reilly said there is speculation among scientists that it could be used for discovering ways to transmit energy more efficiently. What holds back quantum computing is its computation error rate.
“If you do a computation, you want the correct answer,” O’Reilly said. “In its calculations, if a quantum computer gets a single one of the answers wrong, then it’ll cascade, and everything ends up wrong in the end.”
This high level of error is a hurdle that makes quantum computers not quite useful for everyday use, compared to classical computers. UO, UCLA and MIT are working toward “error correction,” techniques for elements of quantum computers to detect errors without having to throw out computations.
While at Oxford Ionics, Allcock has been on the cutting edge of reducing an error operation to a ratio of 1:10,000 operations. But O’Reilly said for quantum computers to achieve useful-scale calculations for the ambitious projects and research physicists are hoping for, errors should be minimized to be about 1:1,000,000,000,000,000,000.
The research that Oregon Ions Group is working on could impact how quantum computers are operated everywhere, increasing their role to everyday use. If researchers can get beyond the errors in quantum computing, they could improve how scientists use quantum computers.
“You’ll get more bang for your buck and more power,” O’Reilly said.
Go in-depth on how quantum computing works.
—By Henry Houston, College of Arts and Sciences