Weeks of turning knobs by hand to get halfway to one qubit

Yeah, the introduction to quantum. started during secondary school, high school, as they call it in the US, ⁓ you know, this weird spooky thing. You'd hear about these materials and, you know, such as graphene and it's like, okay, well, how can we understand how graphene works? like, you get to grips with bit of quantum mechanics exposure. So that's really the initial seedlings were planted, but I didn't really understand the entire impact of the quantum computer until I got to university as an undergrad and I think it was just very clear studying material science at Oxford you spend a lot of time learning about engineering alloys you know hard things like steel and aluminium and titanium and you learn about how these materials are made and why they're made in a certain way if you want to make a Coca-Cola can versus let's say a vacuum chamber to put ⁓ you know, a shift into outer space. And you quickly learn that actually many of the things we know about these materials and how to make them were done completely by trial and error. And when you get to more advanced materials such as nickel superalloys, which are these amazing materials which consist of mainly nickel and they're often single crystals of nickel but with 20, 30 different elements added in just at the right percentages and weights of percentage to allow you to basically fly from London to San Francisco for $400 instead of $2,000. ⁓ due to the temperature they allow jet engines to operate at. It's like, well, how did we figure that out? well, we kind of have a model, but we also just had to try all these different combinations. And then being in Oxford at that time, you know, when Oxford Ionics was being founded by Chris Ballance, which recently got bought by IonQ, ⁓ Oxford Quantum Circuits. And so quantum was really in the air. was kind of like the right place, right time.

Yeah ⁓

I applied for a PhD in quantum because I was interested but also because it was just like the hardest thing to be quite frank to you. I chose it because it was hard.

Mm. It's time to be new actually, that you really enjoy cracking tough problems, not like everybody will take

Yeah, and you know, yeah, just it was different. I was studying engineering alloys. I was like, well, okay, let's get to the grips of the base of this problem. So I applied for this PhD, which was think the original title was like read out of quantum devices or quantum semiconductor devices and worked on my PhD. The first few weeks were some of the most painful weeks. of the PhD because I quickly realized that despite looking and watching these videos of Google and IBM, you know, saying, we have 10 qubits at the time or 50 qubits. A lot of the work to get those qubits was done completely manually. And there I was with a different technology. So these semiconductor chips also doing manual work, trying to get one qubit. And it took me weeks to just get like halfway along that journey. And I said to my supervisor, Natalia said, like, never again, sorry. Like, this is crazy. Yeah, like I want to pass the PhD. I don't want to be here in a twiddling knobs. And she looked at me like, you know, what? Like, this is how it's done. But also she was like, well, look, we're, you know, we're thinking about automating this, this whole process. Maybe you look more into that. You know, I have another PhD student looking at that.