Robyn Williams: The Science Show on RN, and time once more for some quantum guitar.

[Music]

Professor David Reilly with one of his pieces, and we'll hear about his diamonds in a minute. And from Donna Strickland, who was only the third woman in the world to win a Nobel Prize for physics.

But, before we do, something from The Money, the program presented by Richard Aedy, which last week confirmed what we've just heard from Jayne Thompson.

Phil Morle: For one reason or another this country has a concentration of some of the most talented, globally in-demand quantum computing experts, and there is an opportunity right now today to build the Silicon Valley of quantum computing and to do that here in Australia, and that's truly the next generation of computing, which will unfold over the next ten years and live for decades after that.

And the other side of that same equation is the great migration out of Silicon Valley, which is happening. My brother, for example, works at Facebook where everyone has been told they don't need to come back and work in the office, and so he doesn't live in Silicon Valley anymore. That's one result of the pandemic. So I think the world of innovation is afoot, it's in motion, it's going to land different to where it was in 2019.

Richard Aedy: Yes, how big is your fund? Are you able to give me a kind of dollar amount?

Phil Morle: Yes, our first fund is $240 million.

Richard Aedy: The implication is first fund. Are there going to be more?

Phil Morle: That's right, we are getting close to closing our second fund and that will be the same sort of quantum.

Richard Aedy: So, overall, Phil, you actually sound not buoyant but definitely optimistic, despite what we've been going through with the pandemic.

Phil Morle: I suppose I am. I am worried, nevertheless, and let's say vigilant. I'm vigilant, I'm watching very, very carefully. I meet with our start-up founders, the CEOs of our companies every week or two to say what's happening, what's changing, what do we need to know, how do we adapt. So there's very real-time adapting happening, and anything could happen in the weeks and months to come, but there is still a massive planet with lots of people on it with an endless amount of problems to solve which companies can solve, and there is no reason why the venture supported start-up world can't be bigger than it has ever been.

Richard Aedy: Phil Morle is a partner with Main Sequence Ventures.

Robyn Williams: Richard Aedy from The Money program on RN every Thursday, 5:30. Yes, Australia certainly has a reputation for quantum work and needs to prepare a qualified workforce.

Now let's meet that guitarist at the University of Sydney, David Reilly. He also works with diamonds and has a position with Microsoft.

First of all, you haven't brought a guitar with you.

David Reilly: I should have done so.

Robyn Williams: You should have done so because you remind me of the kind of Brian May of Australian physics.

David Reilly: Not quite as tall or as talented.

Robyn Williams: He's amazing, isn't he. What do you play?

David Reilly: At the moment I really can't get the Fender Stratocaster out of my hand, but it depends on the style of music.

Robyn Williams: I remember your playing in fact at the opening of this department, the nano research outfit five years ago or four years ago, whatever it was. But have you brought any tiny diamonds with you?

David Reilly: I have not. Although, they are probably around on the floor and in the air to some very small amount.

Robyn Williams: They are that small?

David Reilly: Yes, they're tiny, nanometres in size. The ones that we focus on are synthetic.

Robyn Williams: And these are ones that are in the body and they are spotted by the MRI, in other words the machine that looks through you to see what's going on inside the body. But what do they tell you as a person who wants to find out what's wrong with the body or not?

David Reilly: Well, the motivation is really trying to track something in the body. We wanted to make a lighthouse, and what you attach that lighthouse to, well, that's really at the discretion of medical research. But, for instance, if you wanted to know where certain drugs went, maybe chemotherapy drugs, anyone who has been in a very challenging circumstance of having to undergo chemotherapy knows that it's a horrific process, in part because those drugs go everywhere and they attack healthy tissue as much as they do cancerous tissue. A lot of the reason for that just blanket approach to treatment is because there are still a lot of open fundamental questions about how do we target certain types of pharmaceuticals to certain particular functions or parts in the body. And from a physics point of view, I mean, I'm obviously a physicist not a medical researcher, but it's a physics problem, how do you create a beacon or a lighthouse that is going to be useful in MRI, not require you to be opened up, not require us to go and biopsy an organ but just to take a somewhat regular MRI, and then have certain regions light up where the drugs are or where they aren't or cancer is or cancer isn't. So that was the long-term motivation, a really challenging physics problem, how to make diamond effectively light up in an MRI.

Robyn Williams: Does it work?

David Reilly: Yeah, it does, we've developed the technique to the point it works in mice, and it is now really moving out of the physics lab into that wider area where it's going to have impact in biomedical research.

Robyn Williams: Normally with various machines you can tell whether there is a tumour there, how extensive it is. You're looking at something rather small, but what kind of things are you being able to spot that the normal X-ray-type investigation can't?

David Reilly: The history of where this came from maybe gives you a better understanding of what we're trying to do. I read a paper justI remember I think I was waiting somewhere, it wasn't to see a doctor, it was something like that, I was reading something and I came across an article that said that chemotherapy drugs ferried around the body on a substrate, like on a raft, and that raft happened to be nano-diamond because it's relatively inert and doesn't react and is somewhat safe in small concentrations. And I thought that's really interesting, they're just using diamond purely for the reason that it's inert and it doesn't react with anything. Physics point of view tells you that diamond has other remarkable properties to be optically active, and it's also possible to basically program its nuclear spins, the little tiny bar-magnets that live in the inside of the atom, orient them such that it can give you an image and a signature in an MRI. So it's all about then attaching to something else, goes along for the ride, it's a big lightbulb that will light up whatever it is that it's attached to.

Robyn Williams: This nano outfit that you are in also of course works on quantum computing. Now, without making you cross I hope, I usually think of quantum computing not just at the University of New South Wales and Michelle Simmons, but also with silicon. In what way is your investigation different?

David Reilly: Yes, silicon is a very interesting material, and the effort that you're describing has been around now for over 20 years, and in fact my PhD is from that activity at the University of New South Wales, in fact before it just started back in the late '90s. Silicon is in many ways a very obvious choice in which to make what we call qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information. And the reason that they are an obvious choice is because the name of the game when it comes to quantum information is trying to protect it. It's very fragile, it wants to become regular, boring classical information all the time.

And to preserve these exotic or almost very counterintuitive properties, one has to preserve the quantum nature. So the name of the game is protect it. And silicon is a material that when it comes to the electron spin or the nuclear spin, again that is the little bar-magnet goes along with the electron or the nucleus in an atom, silicon is a material that is extremely free of uncontrolled bar-magnets, uncontrolled spin. So if you then intentionally put a spin in silicon, that's great because that spin can encode information and there is no other spins in the system that can lead to a loss of quantum information.

However, the challenge is, and this is something I think over the last 20 years we've realised, is that if you think of a line where you can choose between really protected systems where the information is stored in a way that is isolated, like silicon, and up the other end of the line is controllable, I can manipulate it really quickly, I can interact with it very strongly, and the challenge is how do you create systems that are both highly protected from the environment but not highly protected from the control because I want to be able to manipulate it. And that did my head in, thinking about that problem. You realise that there is no escaping it.

You can choose your flavour of qubit, it could be spins in silicon, highly protected, but a bit challenging to control, pretty slow and so on, or qubits that want to interact with everything, including the environment, but they can also be controlled very effectively and very quickly. You know, how do you break out of that double-edged sword? That was what inspired me to start to work on very different systems. And the work that's happening here at the University of Sydney is really about trying to explore new types of qubits that break free of this limitation.

Robyn Williams: In different materials?

David Reilly: Different materials, but totally different principles, totally fundamentally different ways of storing and manipulating quantum information. So we are trying to build what we call a topological qubit, that is a system that uses topology, the branch of mathematics associated with global properties of shapes, we want to use those principles to protect the information and break free of this challenge of protected but controllable. So, very different.

Robyn Williams: The president of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering Hugh Bradlow is the president, and he famously said, and we broadcast this on The Science Show, that there are many ways of tackling this gigantic field of quantum computing. And if you imagine a horse race, it's one where you will have not just one winner, there will be a whole stream. And what you're doing is being supported by Microsoft, which shows that they've got tremendous faith in what you are accomplishing with your search for qubits. What's the relationship built on, what does it mean?

David Reilly: There's a whole range of interesting things to unpack there. The first is I would agree with Hugh that we don't havewe, the world, humankind does not yet, in my view, possess a technology that's going to allow us to build a quantum computer, not one of scale that's going to be significant enough to do impactful things, we don't have that technology yet.

We need to go back to the drawing board and really now we understand a lot of these ideas better, that's Microsoft's view, and in some ways it's actually a little bit pessimistic because I think we as a group within the company over a number of years are working on these different systems. You know, many of the people that are part of Microsoft's effort, including myself, started in spin qubits, in silicon or in other materials, or superconducting technology, the different flavours of qubit, and after a decade or so in that, you realise there needs to be other ways of doing it.

And so it's a collection of people who are actually a little bit pessimistic about the approaches that are out there, let's figure out how to do it right, that's going to allow us to scale, build a machine of sufficient complexity and size that it can go after. In some ways Microsoft is not interested in building a quantum computer, it's interested in the applications and the impact of such a machine. So we want to build a useful machine.

Robyn Williams: And it's going to change the world, it's a big deal.

David Reilly: Exactly, and that's what our sights are set on, it's not about for us a physics experiment. For me personally that's very interesting but I recognise if you're going to touch people in the street, if you're going to make an impact in people's lives beyond a physics experiment, then you have to build a very different machine, one that is sufficiently complex and large-scale that it can solve really hard problems.

Robyn Williams: I'm sure in your late-night thoughts you've had dreams about the ways in which it's going to be if everything goes right. What are some of those dreams are made of, what would kind of speculation can you have, not simply just, if you like, more secure bankcards, but our lives, how will they be affected?

David Reilly: You can spend a lot of time dreaming about that. There are things we see right now with the technology as we understand it, even though it doesn't exist at the level that you can actually start to use it. One can imagine using it for obviously a range of things in what people call quantum chemistry, a lot of designing of, again, pharmaceuticals, catalysts, chemicals that are needed in manufacturing, dyes and so on, carbon capture. Many of those types of applications will benefit I think from having a machine of sufficient scale, a quantum computer that can really solve some of the intricacies of quantum chemistry problems.

But the truth is we really don't know, and that sounds bizarre because people think why would you put such a huge effort into building something you don't even know what it's good for. And the answer to that I think is a little bit subtle. On the one hand we can identify applications, but for me a quantum computer changes the fundamental logic, it's totally different logic to how the machines that we carry around in our pockets work. And I think when you change that underlying fundamental aspect of how computing works, it would be very surprising if that didn't also open up all kinds of other applications. I think we can look back in history and see that many, many times. I think the most exciting applications will be the ones we can't dream about and envisage.

Robyn Williams: Just to give you a tiny bit of story which you can bounce off, once I was at a conference and a little old man was looking at an exercise machine, and he thought it would be good for his back and he went off to get his credit card. And I said to the woman running the booth, I said, 'Do you know who that was? That was one of the three guys who got the Nobel prize for inventing lasers. And this was something for which apparently there was no use, laser, organised light. Okay, his credit card is going to be read by you by a laser beam.' In other words, you have something which is so huge, like computers have become so huge, transformed the world. In other words, jobs, in other words who knows what.

David Reilly: Yes, that's exactly right, and transistors are also another story that there are still many people alive who lived through that era and know firsthand about the discussions where people said; what are we going to do with this stuff? The transistor, the original motivation was to make a repeater, telephone repeater stations more robust, serviceable, less frequentlyget away from vacuum tubes that were always blowing. But as they realised they were holding something that was also very small; what are we going to do with that? And here we are, and it's not that long ago, 30, 40, 50 years, and now we are carrying 10 billion of these things around in everybody's pocket and doing things that we could never imagine.

So humans are pretty bad I think at predicting the future, but you've got to believe if you change the fundamental way in which you're doing logic, the logic that you learn in kindergarten, in preschool, whatever, one plus one equals two. Imagine if, well, actually there is some other laws here, some other fundamental mathematics that you can tap into, of course that's going to lead to many other applications, and we are getting a glimpse of those now but I think it's really going to be exciting over the next 10, 20 years to just see how the world changes because we've changed the fundamental logic.

Robyn Williams: A final question, a very short one; have you recorded an album, as they used to call it, done live gigs?

David Reilly: Not for some time. I do have fun recording at home, and in this day and age you can easily do that and plug in. Your laptop is a recording studio, it's a fascinating thing to me actually because talking about vacuum tubes and transistors, I've got to tell you this, this really does amuse me more than keep me up at night, but the idea that for aficionados of sound and music and guitars and amplifiers, it's the vacuum tube that sounds so good, and people spend huge amounts of money to buy amplifiers built from vacuum tubes, as opposed to transistors. But today you can take your laptop with 10 billion transistors, run an operating system and a whole range of high-level applications and software, and then you can dial up the sound with those 10 billion transistors in your CPU, you can dial up the sound of one vacuum tube. So here we are emulating with all of this complex software the sound of 50 years ago, and it's remarkable how history repeats itself in some very weird way like that.

Robyn Williams: Professor David Reilly at the University of Sydney's Nano Centre.

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