Chicago hopes to become a world centre for quantum research
To a casual visitor, the basement of the William Eckhardt Research Centre, at the University of Chicago, might appear nothing special. Whereas the upper floors of the building are a postmodern tower of angled glass, underground the walls are bare-white MDF. Yet to David Awschalom, one of America’s leading molecular physicists, and the director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, it is down here, three storeys below ground, that is the most exciting part of the architecture. The parts upstairs “were made to be beautiful”, he says. “This was made to be functional.” There is almost perfect silence, except for the quiet hum of the air-conditioning. Three feet of concrete absorb even the tiniest of vibrations caused by, say, a truck passing nearby, without affecting the instruments.
Such precision is necessary, because it is in the labs on these floors where students try to measure the movement of individual molecules. A fibre-optic line connects the building directly to Argonne National Laboratory, a government facility 20 miles away in the south-western suburbs of Chicago. Through it, scientists experiment with sending signals by the means of entangled photons. That is just one part of a world-leading research cluster taking root in Chicago into quantum technology, attempting to apply the confusing nature of atoms to practical use in communications and computing. Roughly two-fifths of federal funding into quantum research is spent in Illinois, and four of the country’s ten quantum labs are in the state.
It is still unclear whether quantum technology will ever amount to much. And a lot of the cutting-edge action in the field is happening in the private sector (in firms such as Google, IBM and Intel, and startups like IonQ) rather than in government-funded labs. But if the technology does take off, the Windy City hopes to be at the forefront of it.
2023-07-06 06:54:57
Source from www.economist.com
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