Two UChicago researchers—Ph.D. student Qiaohong Wang and postdoctoral researcher Tian-Xing Zheng—received awards recognizing their outstanding research at the eighth annual Chicago Quantum Summit last month. The ideas proposed in the awardees’ posters could improve storage and computing capabilities in future quantum computers.
This year’s Quantum Summit, hosted by the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE) from November 3 to 4, drew over 1,100 attendees—nearly double the previous year’s attendance—and expanded from the David Rubenstein Forum to event spaces in Willis Tower, where the CQE presented awards to the winning researchers at a reception copresented by the Consulate General of Canada in Chicago and the CQE. The event was sponsored by companies including IBM, Boeing, PsiQuantum, and Unisys, and featured speaker panels, awards, and research presentations.
Wang and Zheng participated in the Summit’s research poster session, a contest with a total of 76 competitors each presenting their contributions to the quantum field. Wang won second-place recognition for her research on sample-based quantum ionization, and Zheng won third place for his research on how to stabilize surface-molecular qubits as a means for long-term data storage.
Although Wang and Zheng are researching quantum technology from different angles, they both want to use quantum as a means of tackling “challenging cases that classical algorithms can’t solve,” Wang told the Maroon.
Zheng’s research followed a way of storing molecular qubits on surfaces so that they are “half-exposed to air” in an engineered structure rather than moving freely or being trapped in 3D crystal structures, he said.
Zheng said he studies how to make systems like this stable and capable of “more opportunities to copy into other system[s]” and interface with those systems. Surface-molecular qubits can be used potentially in “nanoscale quantum sensing” to modernize MRI devices or solve many-body physics problems.
Wang’s studies, supported by an IBM grant, followed sample-based quantum diagonalization, which can be used to model quantum or chemical systems and find their eigenstates and eigenvalues, among other information about the system. By breaking down large chemical systems into smaller chemical problems (called “fragmentation”) that quantum computers can solve at once, this process could make it easier to discover information about large chemical compounds and make systems much faster than traditional computers.
Wang described her research as asking “how… we take advantage of [quantum] resources to still make something useful and maybe even competitive with the classical algorithms.” Quantum can interface with classical computing as well, she said: the technology she studied could allow for a “hybrid quantum–classical feedback loop” to connect the two and “take advantage of both sides of the world.”
Chicago has been recognized as a quantum hub due to its large population of researchers and quantum-specific facilities. The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park and the Argonne National Laboratory are both located in Northern Illinois, and Hyde Park Labs opened earlier this year in Chicago’s South Side, with nine floors of start-up-focused laboratory space.
As an industry, quantum computing has also begun to see an uptick in investment capital, which will likely propel Chicago’s quantum growth; the Department of Energy announced plans to distribute $125 million in funding to both Fermilab and Argonne over the next few years.
Wang attributed the increase in attendance at this year’s event to the growing interest in quantum research in Chicago, noting that more people have joined her quantum lab recently.
However, the industry’s rapid growth has tested the limits of currently available space for quantum research in UChicago buildings, according to Zheng. “Our lab, specifically speaking, is kind of crowded,” he said. “We have a lot of new ideas and equipment, but we don’t have space.”
Quantum research is growing not just because of increasing interest, but also because scientists are beginning to make it scalable. Wang added that with “this sort of technological advancement, there is so much to learn” for both researchers and professionals who want to take this technology to market.
