Our 50th episode (including our Spacecraft Chronicles) is about Quantum Computers. Our guest is Dr. Nima Dinyari from University of Oregon.
Dr. Dinyari, Jordan and Regina have a great time talking Q-bits, Schrodinger’s cat and Quantum leaps. We try our best to explain this complex subject and break it down for non-physicists.
Special thanks to Kurzgesagt for the image and awesome video.
Click Here for Transcript
Dr. Nima Dinyari: This is Nima Dinyari, and you’re listening to Spark Science.
[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Here we go!
? Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
? Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
? As I get all open on betatrons, gamma rays, thermo cracking
? Cyclotron, in and any and every mic
? You’re on, trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
? Molecules, spontaneous combustion, POW
? Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
? I’m every element around
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Welcome to Spark Science, where we share stories of human curiosity. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff. I teach physics and astronomy at Western Washington University. I am here with cohost?favorite cohost?Jordan Baker. How are you doing?
Jordan Baker: I better be your favorite.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I know [laughing.]
Jordan Baker: Uh, yeah. I’m Jordan Baker. I do not have any teaching credentials.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s fine.
Jordan Baker: I do drive a pickup truck.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Do you?
Jordan Baker: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Now you do. Or have you always driven a pickup truck?
Jordan Baker: No. I do now.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Jordan Baker: Right.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Because he’s changed jobs, listeners. If you haven’t been listening to Season Three, you might be surprised that he is no longer a butcher.
Jordan Baker: No longer butcher [speaking in Eastern European-sounding accent.] [Laughter.] Now I’m a home inspector.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Jordan Baker: I own my own business.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Jordan Baker: And I used to cut up dead animals.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: That’s a big deal.
Simultaneous voices: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, who you’re hearing today is our guest, which?he came all the way from Oregon . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: My pleasure.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: . . . which is probably the furthest . . .
Jordan Baker: It is the furthest.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: It is the furthest.
Jordan Baker: I’ve never even come from Oregon.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: And he is Dr. Nima Dinyari, and he is going to talk about quantum computing with us today and his background and how he got into science and what he’s doing now at University of Oregon. So welcome!
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Well thank you for having me, and I’m excited to meet you, Jordan, for the first time, and actually get to know you, Regina.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Ah, thank you.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: We’ve only met once . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yep.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . in your office.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: When I came up last fall and you offered me the opportunity to come talk about stuff that I geek out on.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And so . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s what our show is for.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Should be a lot of fun. A lot has happened since then . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, cool!
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . so we have a lot to talk about I’m sure.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Awesome.
Jordan Baker: I just like your mint green V-neck t-shirt right now.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Ayyy. . .
Jordan Baker: There might be some pictures.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. [Laughter.] There’ll be?listeners, there’ll be pictures on the Facebooks. Yeah, so, I mean, quantum computing is a really, really heady topic. So, I’m going to make you, or ask you to do something that’s probably impossible. Can you give us a really short description of what somebody means when they say quantum computing?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: I’ll try my best . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: And then we’re going to get into your background, because we’re going to make you a human being to our listeners.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes. Thank you. We’re all humans here . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . all us scientists . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . you can be a scientist, too, if you’re human.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. [Laughter.] If you’re a robot, we love you, too.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Jordan Baker: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Well the robots are in the background helping us out. So of course we depend on them . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: We love them . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . and when they are in power, don’t forget that we said that.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right!
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And we’re down to, you know, help you make this a better world.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, we will be your minions, no problem robots.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. We documented that.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: [Laughing.]
Jordan Baker: As long as we get to go on vacation every once in a while, I’m, yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well I mean, you know, the robots in the future are listening to this recording, and they’re like, okay, these three: cool. That’s all we want.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And their friends. [Laughter.] Because you can’t go on vacation alone. You gotta take some friends, go enjoy an experience, and then when you come back to work you can relay on those great times.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Maybe ten, ten at most. That’s all I want, robots. [Laughter.]
Jordan Baker: I’m?just me.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Really? You have a child.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Oh, you’re solo!
Jordan Baker: Yeah, I don’t care about my child. [Laughter.]
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Oh, my?OK, interesting.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is already problems right now.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. [Laughter.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Quantum computing.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: If we want to talk about quantum computing, maybe we should first start with regular computers.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. That probably would be good.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So that we have a good foundation on the things that we all have in front of us. We each have our smart phones out. They’re on the table.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: They are. Each of us actually, I hope Natalie can take a picture of this, because we each do have our smart phone right next next to our mics. [Laughing.]
Jordan Baker: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And so computers have existed for a long time. There’s old computers that are mechanical computers that would calculate things, and you would put in your information, depending on how you assembled the gears, maybe what the ratios were, and then, based on cranking the crank, you know, you would put some other mechanical object, like a punchcard, and it would crunch away at those ratios of gears and where the holes were in the punchcard. And then out would come information, like adding up numbers.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So you have these older computers. And then you start to get vacuum tubes, which are now basically storing the information, whether there was a one or a zero somewhere. And they’re using logic to make the calculations.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So, it’s really simple math applied in a very basic way, and then by adding those things up, we can calculate information that’s really complicated. And all that’s happened between those mechanical ones that were pre-vacuum tube, which was pre-transistor, all we’ve done since then is scale up the power by packing more of those same things into a smaller area. And so we’re using little devices. In your smartphone, you have a something gigahertz processor, and there’s just that many transistors that can be measured per second and that’s what that gigahertz number represents, and that’s . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: What do you mean by a transistor? Like, I mean, so, like, give us a definition about, you know, the simplest definition of a transistor.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: A transistor is an electric switch. So, in that nutshell, it’s a switch that is either on or off. So the electricity is flowing or not. And actually, my expertise is in more the fabrication of the switches or of the potential quantum switches that we’re going to talk about versus, let’s say, the algorithms or the software that’s used to make the switches do the calculations.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Okay. So, not the programming or the computer sciency part of it.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. But I’ll talk?I can talk about that . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . to some degree. But my expertise is in how those switches are made. And they’re a combination of metals, semi-conductors, and oxides. So metals are like wires, like copper and gold. Semi-conductors, you might have heard of like silicon. And then oxide, like glass. Literally, glass is an oxide . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Silicon oxide. So you combine those and you make these different devices, like your smartphone screen is an LED, which is a combination of materials that emits light. Your camera is CMOS or CCD camera, like in your SLR camera, you have a sensor and that’s another microelectronic device, and it’s a combination of these different materials and it takes advantage of some quantum properties in there so light can get converted to a signal, or electricity can be converted into light. Um, so . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: [Interrupting Dr. Nima Dinyari.] And, and just for . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And in the transistor . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . there’s these combination of materials as well, that make electricity go through or not go through, and if it doesn’t go through it’s a zero, and if it does go through it’s a one. And it’s, it’s kind of alike in the abacus, each transistor is the little ball that can be moved around and mark a position that can be, like, referenced later.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, when you say “quantum properties” and you’re saying “light,” I think if you’ve taken a physics course a long, long time ago or if you’ve never taken a physics course, just to kind of remind you that, when we’re talking about quantum things, we’re not talking about?we’re not talking about mechanical things. So like, if you’ve, you know, taken physics and you’re like, “This ball drops,” you know, “these are forces, this is the energy that we can kind of measure.” That’s kind of all, like, Newton stuff, you know, things that Isaac Newton understood. And then you start getting into stuff where he did not understand [Laughing.] And that’s dealing with things that are going at really, really fast speeds like light, things that are very, very small, what am I missing here Nima?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, that basically sums it up.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So when you’re talking about a hoop rolling down a hill, you don’t need to worry about what the individual atoms are doing . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Exactly, it’s just a hoop . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . to know how fast it’s going to be at the bottom of the hill.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: But if you want to know if the hoop, you know, conducts a current and, you know, how much current it’s going to conduct after you apply a certain voltage, you might need to know about the quantum mechanics, especially when it gets small.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: When it gets very, very small.
Jordan Baker: I’ve never wanted to know how much electricity a hula hoop can provide, I don’t know . . . [Laughter.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: You would if that was your only means of electricity. You’d be like, “I only got this hula hoop.”
Jordan Baker: I only got this hula hoop!
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Maybe we can create some renewal energy, like a hula hoop that, like . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, mechanical energy turning into electricity, then you’d care. [Laughter]
Jordan Baker: I guess.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: For that festival this summer [Laughing.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. Well its, you know, when you want to get off the grid, you know, and you just want to go off your own energy that you produce: hula hoops.
Jordan Baker: Right.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Jordan Baker: Okay. Because I bought solar panels . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Did you really?
Jordan Baker: . . . so I didn’t have to move. But now I might have to.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: We might do another show on solar panels, actually.
Jordan Baker: Oh.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Awesome!
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Early late at night, I wander off into a land
? You can go, but you mustn’t tell a soul
? There’s a world inside where dreamers meet each other
Jordan Baker: Welcome back to Spark Science, where we’re talking about quantum computing.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, so what I was talking about, the quantum, I was just thinking, I picture things differently, and I appreciate you trying to draw that out.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Because, like, us scientists can be in our head and see pictures and maybe we can talk about them, so, when I think of, like, a camera on your phone, I think of this light bulb above of is emitting all these photons. There’s billions of them.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: In this room.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes. And we’re seeing each other through these billions of photons, but each one of those photons strikes the camera and it produces an electron and the absence of an electron, which we call a hole. And these are these quantum particles that I envision that generate, like, the signal in the CCD camera that becomes the image that we will look at later on Instagram or whatever.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So, the quantum is the little particles that come together to transfer information. I started off explaining this classical computer, these little switches that are on and off, and we just use logic math to calculate complicated things.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: And logic math are like, this, it either is or it isn’t . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: There are these gates that we talk about . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: True or false . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: True or false, yeah.
Jordan Baker: Is it kind of like, I don’t know, what is that, binary or whatever?
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, pretty much that, but like . . .
Jordan Baker: I was making a quantum leap. [Laughter.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I love Scott Bakula. [Laughter.]
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So yeah, depending on some conditions input into the logic, you’re going to get, based on that logic, a certain set of outputs, and you can combine those outputs into new inputs and over time, you can calculate things, like what’s two times two.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. But, I mean, but a regular computer, even though it is dealing with electrons and current, it’s not called a quantum computer because even just, I think, at a certain level, current and electrons moving and even light bumping out an electron, it’s still, I don’t want to say simple, but it’s still easy to kind of deal with, and you’re not really diving into quantum mechanics yet. But now, I think the video you asked me to watch [Laughter] explained to me that you have these transistors now, these switches that are like smaller than a blood cell. So then when you start getting things that small, then you start having electrons behave or can behave in a quantum way.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes. That’s the challenge that we’re facing. I could’ve said “problem,” but scientists like to look at problems as challenges to continue pushing things forward.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Some scientists do. [Laughing.]
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. Maybe successful ones.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, that’s true.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Not all successful scientists are optimists, though, maybe. [Laughing.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. I think that’s the key, yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes. We’ve been basically packing more power into a smaller space, and that’s, you know, a testament to these smartphones that are more powerful than the computers that were calculating the code for the Apollo Missions.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right, which were like the size of rooms.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, yeah! The vacuum tubes and the rooms and the people, like, you know, walking around and they’re inside the computer. And now, no one is walking around inside of these smartphones.
Jordan Baker: [Inaudible.]
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Oh. Yeah, so now, instead of using this brute force method, we’re being actually, with the technology of packing more transistors into a smaller space, we’ve used that same technology to build quantum systems to then hopefully implement quantum computers. And actually there’s a company that is selling them and delivering them to companies . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Really?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Interesting.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So they’re called D-Wave and lots of Googling and looking up on the internet, you’ll find lots of great content on, you know, who’s buying them, what applications they can be used for, and how they work. And so, this company, if we step back, Intel is the dominating company in terms of fabricating this CPU, the brains of the computer or the smartphone. And so D-Wave came out and said, you know, we want to lead in terms of providing this product. I don’t know how much they cost . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: A begillion dollars.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, and they’re one-off machines and I’m sure they’re getting better because the technology is getting better quickly.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: What do you mean by one-off machines?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So, Los Alamos National Labs puts in an order and they build one. It’s not like a Dell on the shelf, you know.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Jordan Baker: [Inaudible.] [Laughter.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: They’re like custom, custom like . . .
Jordan Baker: Like an elf on a shelf. [Laughter]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s alright.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, so you know, like, Los Alamos National Labs wants to model some very complicated things that, even with the most powerful computers, would take a long time.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: It would take like years?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So, to put some context, when the first human genome was . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Sequenced.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . sequenced, thank you.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s okay.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: It took a year for the machine to crunch through all the digits and calculate, you know, some 17 volumes of the DNA of the human genome.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So now, we can do, with just regular computers, 10,000 genome sequencings every three months so that?and that’s just using the brute force method.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. It’s still the old method, just better equipment.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So, you know, in the late ’90s, early 2000s, it took a year to sequence one genome and the computer was the size of, let’s say, like a server, warehouse size thing. And now we have a little microfluidic experiment with a little computer and it does 10,000?if it was ran at full bore every three months. So, the quantum computer will be tasked for problems that are very complicated that even a classical computer or?a bunch of classical computers put together, we call those servers. So, we have like super computers, if they’re really well-tuned and they’re designed for certain code to be optimized and the scientist knows how to write the code so the computer’s really efficient at analyzing it, and still they run code for weeks or, you know, a long time to do these simulations, like, aerodynamics of the fighter jet that some company wants to make and is this non-linear differential equation to see how the material’s going to behave at Mach 7 . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Because they promised that it wouldn’t blow up, you know, when it hit Mach 7 and they gotta simulate that . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: To make sure it doesn’t.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah! [Laughter.] And so quantum computers will use a completely different technique so, in the logic for the classical computer each bit can be a zero or a one. And it’s measured and it’s known to be in that state. And so the way that quantum computers . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: In that state meaning either one or zero?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, and then they basically just measure as the code goes through the transistors, and over time, somehow it crunches up enough data to open that file and present, you know, that picture that we take at that party that we want to post on Facebook, you know. So all those ones and zeros are calculated with the software in your phone and that represents the image.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: The quantum computer, each bit is going to be given more information than just being a zero or a one, and if the bits are entangled, these quantum bits or qubits are entangled, then you can have each of these bits being in different states at the same time. So it’s exploring all the possible combinations of a problem, rather than doing it one at a time like a classical computer would. Like, what happens when the function is this variable, and what happens when the function is that variable? And then, let’s make a plot so we can see the trajectory of, like, it airstream off of the back of the jet. The quantum computer will measure all those values at once or in parallel because of the architecture of the hardware and the quantum nature of these bits of information.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. And I want to come back to that. I want to really get into what we mean because I think, for our listeners who know a little bit about physics, I think that’s a good starting point but then actually going in and . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: . . . talking about what do we mean by entanglement? What do we mean by, you know, multiple things at once? But what I want to do right now is I want to take a break, and when we come back, I want to talk about how you got into this field, what you actually do, what did you do, and then we can get into, like, the actual physics one more time. I’m going to take a break from the hard physics.
Jordan Baker: Break time.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Dance in the trees
? Paint mysteries
? The magnificent droid plays there
? Your magic mind
? Makes love to mine
? I think I’m in love, angel
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take her back to Wondaland
? She thinks she left her underpants
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
Jordan Baker: Welcome back to Spark Science, where we’re talking about quantum computing and qubits. I heard earlier “qubits,” and that’s, and correctly if I’m wrong, because I’m probably right, [Laughter] when you say “qubits” it’s like an electronic cube that can attach to another cube, once they find each other . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Because they’re entangled, right?
Jordan Baker: Well, yeah. I mean, it’s kind of like a Transformer or something. All the parts come together and it creates something new. That’s pretty close, right?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: The qubits are physical objects, but they aren’t cubes and there’s a lot of different potential qubits and that’s what part of my research was, was exploring . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, cool.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . a candidate as a qubit. So . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like, what could be a qubit?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. So, when we say qubit, we’re just saying quantum bit. So instead of classical bit, we’re putting the prefix “cu” for “qu” to call it qubit. So that’s all that is.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So like, instead of insert with ones or zeros or you’re dealing with ones and zeros, now we’re dealing with something that is more complex than a one and a zero.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes. It’s more rich. It’s a combination. So, in quantum mechanics, what you might have heard is things can be in a quantum superposition.
Jordan Baker: No.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: [Laughter] That’s why we have Jordan.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Have you, have you heard of like the Schrödinger’s cat explanation of quantum mechanics, it’s like a classical one?
Jordan Baker: No.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Okay. [Laughter.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: This’ll be, we’ve actually, and being a science show and being a physicist, I’m actually surprised I’ve never talking about this on our show, so this is, let’s do it! Nima, you win!
Dr. Nima Dinyari: I win? We’re all winners.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: You win the Schrödinger’s cat explanation. Go!
Dr. Nima Dinyari: There’s a cat. This is kind of sadistic, right?
Regina Barber DeGraaff: It’s a terrible story, but here you go.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, but it’s a way of bringing it to the common person. You know, if this is going to be on the internet, we’ve got to relate it to cats somehow.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. [Laughter]
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And we just did it. So, the internet’s happy that cats have been mentioned, and I don’t know who came up with this original story, but it’s kind of the one that’s given to bring it to more classical terms. So there’s a cat that’s in a box.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I’m pretty sure it was Schrödinger, right?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: He came up with the story?
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I think so. I’m going to look it up now.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Oh man, okay. [Laughter.] So, the cat’s in the box and, you know, what will cats do? They nap, they’re curious, they eat, they do other things like tear up your couch. But this cat in the box has the option of eating some food or not, depending on his mood. And if it eats the food that has been poisoned, it will die. And if it doesn’t eat the poisoned food yet, then it’s alive. So, you know, you can’t really measure the system. Like, Schrödinger’s not going to let you, like, poke the box. You’re going to have to say, “Well, what’s the probability of the cat being alive or dead?” You could then, you know, make a guess. “Ok, how long has it been?” Or “How hungry was the cat before you put it in?” so you know some conditions and you might guess. But until you open the box, it’s in, like, some kind of probability of being both, and that’s the superposition kind of metaphor.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like, you don’t actually know if it’s a one or a zero, but it has good probability to be maybe a one. Maybe it’s like, 60% it’s probably a one, you know, but at that moment before you actually know, it could be a zero or it could be a one. Like, you don’t know until you open the box.
Jordan Baker: You get to that point when it’s 50/50.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right, but as soon as you open that box, you will know, right? As soon as you open the box, you’re like, “A live cat! Woohoo!” Or, “Dead cat.”
Jordan Baker: Zooo.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Exactly.
Jordan Baker: Right.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: And the same thing happens with quantum mechanics. Like, until you actually measure a particle, there are things about particles that will go into like spins and all that kind of stuff, but there’s like a characteristic of a particle, and you won’t know anything about it until you actually measure it, and once you do, boom! It definitely is that, then. But if you don’t, you have no idea. Like, it could be either.
Jordan Baker: Right. There’s tons of cats.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Jordan Baker: Just waiting to be opened.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: It was Schrödinger who . . . [Laughter.] Schrödinger, yeah, Schrödinger.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: I wonder if he knew the story would live on this long.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: His is a little different. It’s like . . .
Jordan Baker: Or was that kind of his obituary?
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. [Laughter.] It actually probably was, unrelated to that. But, his story is that there is radioactive stuff in the box, and if it decays randomly, like radioactive material decays, then it triggers a, like, hammer that will smash, like poison, and then the poison will like be in the box. So you have no idea, like, randomly if this hammer’s going to break the poison or not.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. Oh.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So all these qubits, like, and when you say that it holds information . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Jordan Baker: Have you thought about renaming it, so people don’t get confused?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Well, so that’s the thing is, right now . . .
Jordan Baker: Like “quminbits.”
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Most . . . that was one thing I wanted to talk about. A lot of humans don’t really know how the phone works, but they still know how to use it. Like, you can hand this phone to a toddler who doesn’t even know how to walk and they’re using the phone, so, you know, the people who understand what’s going on in there, we want, like, the reason we’re here is to get the general population to appreciate science, to learn about what’s going on.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And so maybe the language that we use could be better at times [Laughter] to help . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Good job, Jordan.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . relay that.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. I think that’s an amazing, I think, statement, that a lot of people don’t think about, is that, we have all this like crazy, interesting, really difficult science that’s all around us, and we don’t even acknowledge it. Like, my nephew Van is two and a half, and he can’t put together like, the best sentence (he’s pretty good), but like, he’s learning how to talk, but he can manage a tablet better than I think most other children can, or even adults.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: His home screen is looking better than my mom’s, I’m sure: organized, he’s got folders. [Laughter.]
Jordan Baker: Nothing against mom, but, uh . . . [Laughter.]
Dr. Nima Dinyari: My mom . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: He can help his grandmother with electronics, well, like, finding things on YouTube and stuff.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Oh, yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: And Pokemon hunting, he’s really good at that. And I’m like, you’re like, how is this possible?
Jordan Baker: So, is that how you got into it? You just saw a computer and then you were like, “Ploodoodoodoodoo,” you like, knew how to do it?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Well, the computers that we grew up with didn’t have this intuitive user interface.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: No.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And the feedback was not as rich, right?
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So this screen, the way you can touch the screen and the way the visuals get, yeah, the bit, the thing that gets processed in the phone is an actual physical thing.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, what is it?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So, there’s a lot of different proposed ones. So the company that I was talking about earlier, it is?OK, so let’s talk about the classical bit first.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So the classical . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: And I swear we’ll eventually get to like, your life . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, the classical bit, the transistor’s a sandwich. And there’s a combo . . .
Jordan Baker: Oooh, what kind of sandwich?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes, it’s a metal oxide semiconductor sandwich. You wouldn’t want to eat it because you might . . .
Jordan Baker: Kind of like a club sandwich?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, just missing a little bacon, I guess.
Jordan Baker: Oh, okay.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: But, so it’s basically a three-dimensional structure that can store a certain amount of electrons in a corral.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So there’s little corrals where you can pump electricity, and it stores that electricity and if it has enough electricity it’s a one, and if it doesn’t have enough electricity it’s a zero. So you’ve sandwiched a bunch of metal in between a bunch of insulators, so the electrons can get stuck in places. And then you can go later and measure if there’s electrons there or not.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So that’s a what a classical bit is, and they’re just basically making little cubes, basically . . .
Jordan Baker: Yep, yep, yep.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . in the semi-conductor . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I like how Jordan’s like, “I am vindicated.”
Jordan Baker: Yes, thank you.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Little cubes of corrals, and those little charges go in there, but so the D-Wave company?I looked this up to understand their technology . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: These, like, millionaires . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Oh, yeah, yeah. They’re gonna make some scrilla. So the quantum bits that they’re using still involve electrons. So electrons are a fundamental particle. They’re found, what you might learn about them in high school is they’re the things that orbit the nucleus of the atom that, you know, fill up the periodic table.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: We could just talk about static electricity, right?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, static electricity.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: We could just say that, like, you rubbed your balloon on your hair or the wall or something, you’re transferring electrons from one object to another and that’s why that’s happening. You’re making one thing more charged than the other.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, and that’s what’s stored in those corrals in the classical bit. And in the quantum bit, it’s a few or a couple electrons that are moving around in a circle, and that circle is made out of a metal that’s deposited on the surface of another material that gives it really good properties so it’s, they can cool it down to really low temperatures and the metal’s going to have no resistance. And so these electrons that are traversing this loop can last for a long time.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And so there are these electrons and they’re moving in an orbit that’s, the diameter of the orbit is on the order of like a tenth of a human hair. So, they’re orbiting around, and there’s a special material in there called a superconductor. And actually, the superconductor, it’s a superconducting Josephson junction.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I learned about this in, some time in my past.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I don’t remember when.
Jordan Baker: I’ve never learned a Josephson junction.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: It’s just so weird when I actually remember certain words from like, school.
Jordan Baker: It’s an alliteration, so. [Laughter]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, that’s probably true.
Jordan Baker: That’s why it stuck with ya.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take her back to Wondaland
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Regina Barber DeGraaff: Welcome back to Spark Science. We’re talking to Dr. Dinyari from University of Oregon about quantum computing.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So this, these materials, these superconducting materials, so let’s talk about that for a second.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, superconducting is something that was really hard, I think, I remember in physics in undergrad, I was like, what exactly is this? You know, it takes a while to kind of, totally understand. But it took humanity a while to totally understand.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Jordan Baker: Isn’t it just putting a battery on your tongue? [Laughter.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Nima looks so surprised. [Laughter.] No!
Jordan Baker: I mean, that’s what I do.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Well so, your tongue, your tongue is a conductor and that’s why you can get zapped, and it’s not superconducting, it’s just partially conducting. And then, when you get like a copper wire to connect, like, your battery terminals, that’s a really good conductor, but it’s not superconducting. So, when you send electricity through that conductor, it warms up, so there’s some resistance, and that resistance converts the electrical energy, the motion of those electrons trying to go through that pipe, let’s say. They bounce around and just warm up the system rather than making it all the way through the pipe.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. It turns into thermal energy.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. So, in these special materials that this gentleman was exploring during his PhD, he said, “What happens if you take a little bit of the material and you separate it by a gap, and that gap is small enough that maybe the electrons on one side can tunnel through?” This is like one of those quantum properties that are being taken advantage of for these quantum computers. Like, what happens when it tunnels through? And so those properties are now being taken advantage of for the qubit. So . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, let’s take a break for the tunneling thing. Because like, quantum tunneling is something that’s, you know, if you’re a physics major you learn about it, but if you’re not, you definitely don’t. So, like, basically, you have an electron and it has a path, you know. Like it goes down this wire and it’s like, “Cool, I’m an electron, I’m current,” right? But if there’s a break it stops, right? It’s like putting a dam in a river, right?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: If we were talking about current, we’re always talking about water, you know. Imagine that as like a river of electrons, and if you put a dam in it, it’s going to stop. But quantum mechanics is crazy. [Laughter.] And what happens is that in a river of electrons, sometimes, an electron can actually tunnel through that dam, tunnel through that barrier and suddenly, boom! That piece of water, or that electron in that river, just hops over the dam and suddenly, “Now, I’m flowing again!”
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: And if the dam isn’t, what do we want to say, big enough, it’s much easier to tunnel through it with these, like, weird quantum properties. So is that . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: That’s very accurate.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, thank you. I’m a physicist. [Laughter.]
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: People forget. [Laughter.]
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Well, so that’s the problem that the classical computer’s facing, is as they’re trying to pack more transistors into a smaller space, there’s less space between the individual transistors and now the electrons are tunneling . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: . . . they’re . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Cause nothing’s stopping them anymore.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. Now they’re?so an electron is both a particle and a wave. So when we were talking about the hoop rolling down the hill, we just need to talk about, like, the particle, the hoop.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: The stuff, the material.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: But if we were to begin to like, think about how electrons behave at the quantum level, they have waves . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: The small, small level.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. They have wave-like behaviors that allow them to be in different places at the same time, and that’s where the cool stuff happens, and that’s where the quantum computer’s going to take advantage of that behavior to process the information instead of using the old, like, let’s say abacus style.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. No, I really like that idea, and you said it earlier, this idea of like, if you’re doing huge mathematics and you just have to, like, do this giant calculation, you can just brute-force it, you can just work through it on a piece of paper. Or, I could do a graph or something and look at all the options?I put in . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes!
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I can put in numbers from one to 100 for ‘x’ and then I can see this line for all my ‘y’s, you know. And so that’s what quantum?that’s kind of what you’re saying. We’re trying to get all the answers at once instead of just one at a time.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, or as many as possible.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And so, before, the bit of information was a zero or a one, and the way they’ve engineered the qubit is it can be in a superposition of those two values. So now that one bit has a lot more information because it can be a zero, a one, a little bit of zero, a little bit of one, to varying degrees, and now we’ve got richer information per bit. And then what becomes even more interesting is when things get entangled, how it explores all the possible solutions more quickly. So these electrons that are going around in a circle at a very low temperature and low energies begin to have these quantum properties, and then the computer can begin to manipulate it to process information and to probe it to, like, get an answer out.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And so, when I was doing my PhD, it was a different flavor of quantum bit or qubit, and the main advantage of mine was trying to do things at a different wavelength of light. So right now, this qubit operates in the microwave regime of radiation. So, you know, we use microwaves to heat up water, because the frequency’s at like 2.4 gigahertz, which is the resonant frequency of like, the dipole of the water molecule.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, I want to talk about resonance too, because that’s something that’s super, super interesting. Like, when you say resonance of a dipole, I want to talk about that. But we’re going to take another break, and when we come back, I swear, listeners, we’re going to talk about your background a little bit, we’re going to talk about resonance, and we’re going to talk about entanglement very quickly, and then pop culture.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take her back to Wondaland
? She thinks she left her underpants
? Take me back to Wondaland
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? Take me back to Wondaland
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? This is your land
? This is my land
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? My supernova shining bright
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Welcome back to Spark Science. We’ve been talking about quantum computing this whole time, no background of yours, but we’re going to get there. But I wanted to talk about resonance, because you were talking about using microwaves for qubits, or just nor?like, qubits, right?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: And how that?it’s related to the resonance of water molecules.
Jordan Baker: It really resonates with me.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Exactly. And I just want to, real quick for our listeners, just talk about resonance real quick. So like, Tacoma’s Narrows Bridge. . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Oh, yeah!
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right?
Jordan Baker: I drive a Toyota Tacoma.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Same thing. [Laughter.]
Jordan Baker: Same thing.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, Jordan, do you know about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge?
Jordan Baker: Yeah, it was a Maxil commercial back in the day. A guy was playing the stereo real loud, and the whole thing was going, “Bluhloodalado…” Ministry was the band.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Really?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Woah!
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Jake would love that.
Jordan Baker: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: For our Washingtonians, we know that there was a big storm, and the frequency of the storm and the wind was the same resonance frequency of the bridge, and what do we mean by resonance frequency is like, if you, like flick a wine glass it will make some sound. It will be like, “Diiing.” And that sound is the resonance frequency of that glass. So if you take a speaker and you play that same sound, it’s going to mess up that wine glass. What happens is if you have a driving frequency, so like a frequency that’s hitting that piece of material over and over and over again, like a sound wave, and it’s the same frequency or very very close to the resonance frequency of that object, then it’s going to exacerbate the vibration, and then the glass is going to vibrate even harder than it would normally if you just flicked it, and it’ll vibrate so much that it breaks.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Mmhmm.
Jordan Baker: Right. Mythbusters did the episode, where they actually had a singer . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah!
Jordan Baker: . . . singing it, and it broke it.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: It was the right frequency, yeah.
Jordan Baker: With his voice. Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So, yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So I just wanted to give our viewers, or sorry, our listeners, kind of that visual of what we mean by resonance.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: If I was teaching like a class on resonance, we would maybe talk about like guitar strings, and you have a certain length and a certain tension, and that guitar string can hold a certain note, and it would be resonant with that note. And then when the performer puts their fingers at different places on the string, they’re changing the notes by changing the length, and so they’re changing the resonance frequency when they pluck it.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: And velocity, the velocity of that wave is related to the wavelength and the frequency, so, wavelength times frequency equals velocity.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So that’s the, one of our frequent, one of our physics equations you can walk away with.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So you’re saying you’re working with a different kind of light. So microwaves, x-rays, gamma rays, for our listeners, those are?that’s all light. That’s all part of the light . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Radio waves . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right, it’s all part of the electromagnetic spectrum. So you’re dealing with other kinds of light.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. Well, so, specifically visible light.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oooh.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So we see in the visible spectrum and around the visible spectrum and then right next to it, in the IR, so they call it the near IR. . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: The infrared.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. Infrared . . .
Jordan Baker: Sorry, I have an infrared camera so . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Jordan Baker: I knew what it was.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Is that for your home inspecting?
Jordan Baker: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Sweet. What are you inspecting for when you use that?
Jordan Baker: Temperature, just temperature differentiations. Like, making sure the?there’s insulation in the walls . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Oh yeah, it’s not just pumping a bunch of heat . . .
Jordan Baker: Seeing if there’s a dark spot, like if there’s a wet floor or something, like heat registers are working.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Cool.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, that’s important right, because how are you supposed to know there’s not going to be insulation in like, that chunk of the house.
Jordan Baker: Yeah, or a rat infestation. I mean, it happens.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: But so, the problem with the microwaves is, is that they don’t transmit far. So microwave radiation can’t be put into a fiber optic and then, you know, send that signal around the world.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So, we want to work with quantum systems in the optical or near infrared, near IR, because those are the types of electromagnetic radiation that can be put in the fiber optics that can then be distributed.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So, these quantum computers, they have these quantum bits inside of them, and the bits are manipulated using microwave radiation, so that’s what’s, let’s say, preparing the information and then doing the logic gates is using these microwave pulses. And then, in the end, they measure the system and get the result out. And then that result is a, you know, classical file that then, if I wanted to share with my team, I would email electronically.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And in the future, it would be great if I can transmit quantum information, and actually . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Without having it to be converted to something that’s classical.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Right.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So I can generate quantum information in my computer and I can send it over to someone else in its quantum state and actually that’s one of the applications of quantum computers is quantum cryptography. So, if I can create information that you could only decrypt using techniques that would break the laws of physics, then there’s no way you can actually decrypt my code.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So I’m writing the information in a way, quantum mechanically, that there’s no way you can break the laws of physics to, like, eavesdrop onto.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So, like, the people who fund these projects want to have secure communication, faster processing, and so that’s the leverage of the quantum computer and that’s why it’s worth the big bucks, like, for Los Alamos National Lab to have a powerful computer at this point. And then if, let’s say, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab buys a quantum computer and they happened to work in the optical regime, they can link up their computers and make a bigger computer.
So that’s what we do when we build servers. We take a bunch of small computers and put them together and make more powerful computers that can, you know, store more information, process more information, and so if we want to link things up globally, we’ll really need to work in the optical regime, or the near infrared, so we can use our fiber optic networks to entangle not just the qubits on the computer, but the computers themselves, to get a more powerful system going. In a crystal?actually, so I live in Eugene, Oregon, there’s a lot of, uh . . .
Jordan Baker: Hippies.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Hippies. [Laughter.] Eco-friendly individuals.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Dead silence: “hippies.”
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Eco-friendly individuals.
Jordan Baker: As soon as you said crystals, I remember going to [Laughter.] Sonoma, Arizona, and my wife bought this necklace, and this lady was like clearing the crystal before she could, like, send it on its way?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Of energy?
Jordan Baker: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Clearing the . . . so, for our listeners, he’s like making this?cupping his hands.
Jordan Baker: I don’t know how she cleared it, but it was done.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Well, so you know physics and quantum mechanics has been appropriated by spiritual people because it does talk about these resonances and frequencies and colors of, like chakras and stuff . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, and things that are, you know, one thing, but also another, and things that can like tunnel through, you know, can be in two places at once, I mean, it’s all very, it sounds very mystical.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I understand how it got coopted, but . . . it did. [Laughter.]
Dr. Nima Dinyari: But, the hippies are on to something, because even a person who might not associate themselves with a hippy, they’re using crystals.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: These screens, these cellphone components, what the magic is is the crystal properties.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Jordan Baker: The liquid crystal display.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s what, yeah.
Jordan Baker: LCD, kids.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Or silicon is, could be in a crystalline form, and that’s what gives it the properties that it can, you know, store and compute information very quickly. We’re taking advantage of that crystal. So, the hippies, they might be onto something. And so, I was working on an engineered atom. So, we have naturally occurring atoms that we would put on a periodic table, and they’re made up of neutrons, protons, and those go in the nucleus, and then there’s an electron that orbits that. And depending on how many of those components they have, they’re a different flavor on the periodic table
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And so those have properties, like energy levels of where the electrons will be, and those are actually where the original, like, quantum bits were being explored, but those experiments were really big, so they went to the Josephson Junction, so they can make it at a much smaller scale. So it would be like the smartphone version of the computer versus the warehouse version of the computer.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And now we’re trying to even make things smaller, and so, diamond, there’s this defect or impurity which has quantum properties, and that’s the one that I was working on for my PhD. So when you have a crystal structure, and that crystal structure is actually filled with a certain atom, that’s the crystal, and diamond is a way that carbon can be brought together to make a crystal.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So, graphite is carbon in a non-crystalline form. And then if you put that under high pressure and temperature for a certain amount of time, the system relaxes into a crystalline form, and that would be diamond. So it’s the same carbon, you’ve done some chemistry or physics, whatever you want to call it, and you’ve converted it into diamond. And it’s just, like, these bricks on the wall here, they’re in a pattern, and if I move so many inches . . .
Jordan Baker: He’s pointing at the bricks behind us.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, and if I move so many inches from brick to brick, you know, I’ll repeat the pattern. It’s going to be every six inches is a new brick. So, in diamond, you have this carbon structure, and then carbon and nitrogen are very close to each other in the periodic table, so nitrogen can find its way into the carbon lattice, into that, the place where carbon atoms should be. And so that’s the impurity or the defect. And there’s some other special sauce that has to occur, but then, when all those things come together, that nitrogen vacancy center in diamond at really low temperatures will have quantum-like behavior, like an atom can.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, what kind of quantum-like behavior?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah, so that’s the important thing to ask. So, when we’re talking about resonance . . .
Jordan Baker: Good question.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Thank you.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. Great question. When we were talking about resonance before, we were talking about, like, the vibrations on a string, and we were trying to connect that to the microwaves shaking the water molecules.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: The water molecules. Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. So when we talk about the quantum properties of atoms, usually we’re talking about the electrons in the atoms and what properties those electrons have. And so, I think, early in the show, we talked about some different properties that could be in different states. So, for a photon, it’s the polarization that can be quantized. It can be in a superposition of vertically polarized?so the electric field is oscillating in the vertical plane or horizontally polarized.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, yeah. And that’s something that’s very complicated. [Laughing.]
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah. And in diamond, the, if you put the electron in a certain state, like, let’s say you want to store the information, it lasts for a really long time.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So that’s the thing that we have to fight, is the environment. So, we’re trying to create this quantum information so we can store it and read it out later, and the environment is trying?or, I don’t know want to say, the environment isn’t a living thing; it’s not trying anything. But it influences the system so that that quantum information gets lost.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: We’re actually running out of time, and this is so, like, I, I think that we’ve talked about, basically, quantum computing this entire time and did not get into your background at all. Maybe that will be another time. But I do want to talk about?we’ve got like a couple minutes left?and I do want to talk about pop culture.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: OK.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Because at the very beginning of this conversation, you hear “quantum computers,” Jordan yells out, “Quantum leap.” Let’s talk about how the word quantum has been, like, co-opted in pop culture.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Mmhmm. Or maybe just misused or misunderstood. So, quantum is a big deal. Like, the prospects of quantum mechanics is a big deal, but it deals with things on a small scale, and things at a very discrete level. So if I talked about a quantum leap, it’s actually a small thing.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So we were talking about, like, astronomical leaps, that’s big.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: So we made an astronomical leap in our understanding of something, not a quantum leap, because that would be, like, you didn’t get much from it.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Like, we didn’t actually even move.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yeah.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. Well, but, we were talking about how like, Quantum Leap the show, that’s OK the way they used it.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Yes.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Because they were talking about like, time travel and they were talking about . . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Multiverse.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, and like, you know, technology and like . . .
Jordan Baker: Ziggy showed up . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Consciousness going into brains, like, crazy stuff which is like, quantum mechanics is crazy. So I think that’s OK, but like, how, where else is like quantum mechanics I think either misused or pop culture or maybe used really well? Can you think of anything?
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Well, so, some people hate it or they love it, which is like The Big Bang Theory.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And, you know, if you take away the laugh tracks, it’s like, well, everything actually sounds pretty flat. [Laughter.] But they do do a good job of, like, in the background and maybe there’s like different props that they have that they try to bring that into the scene and they, I’ve heard them a couple times like talk about stuff and I was like, “Wow, they actually sound like they know what they’re talking about.”
Regina Barber DeGraaff: They have a consultant.
Jordan Baker: I was going to say that. I heard something about that.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: And, I didn’t, I haven’t watched Bill Nye’s new show, but I heard it got mixed reviews because it hit the wrong audience that was looking forward to it was hoping for more.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, wow.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: But I do know that, like . . .
Regina Barber DeGraaff: We want to get him on the show, so we’ll only say good things. “I bet it’s great, Bill!”
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Bill, we love you! You’re doing a great job! [Laughter.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: But, so, Nova obviously does a great job of discussing the science and they vet the people very well, probably better than we did for this show here.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: No, no, this is great. [Laughter.] I’ve learned a lot, like, I really enjoyed the way you kind of broke it down, because even as somebody who has a PhD in physics, there’s a lot of stuff I do not know about the mechanics of what’s actually happening inside the quantum computer.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: Well it’s such a big problem that no one person can know it all. Some people know a lot more than others, but it is a team effort, and that’s what’s so beautiful about science, is we’re building upon, like, each others’ work. And you know, sometimes we question each others’ approaches and, you know, there’s something to be learned when you make mistakes and being a good scientist is learning from mistakes.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: I totally agree. I make lots of mistakes.
Jordan Baker: I agree, and I’m not a scientist.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: [Laughing.] Awesome. Well I want to thank you for coming all the way from Oregon. . .
Dr. Nima Dinyari: My pleasure.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: . . . to hang out with Jordan and I.
Jordan Baker: Yeah.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: It was my pleasure to meet you too.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Aw, thank you!
Jordan Baker: Stop it!
Regina Barber DeGraaff: We love compliments.
Jordan Baker: Us radio stars, no big deal. [Laughter.]
Regina Barber DeGraaff: Thank you again, though.
Dr. Nima Dinyari: My pleasure. Thank you.
Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is Spark Science and we’ll be back again next week. Listen to us on 102.3 FM in Bellingham or KMRE.org streaming on Sundays at 5:00PM, Thursdays at noon, and Saturdays at 3:00PM. If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us an email or post a message on our Facebook page, Spark Science. This is an all-volunteer-run show, so if you want to help us out, go to Sparksciencenow.com and click on “Donate.”
Our producer is Regina Barber DeGraafff. The engineer for today’s show is Natalie Moore. Our theme music is “Chemical Calisthenics” by Blackalicious and “Wondaland” by Janelle Monae.
[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Lead, gold, tin iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
? Iodine nitrate activate
? Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
? Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent and
? Careful, careful with those ingredients
? They could explode and blow up if you drop them
? And then they hit the ground
[End of podcast.]