The Story of IQIM: Institute for Quantum Information and Matter Caltech Magazine – Caltech

Then, in 2000, Preskill and Kimble received a grant from the National Science Foundation, which they used to form the Institute for Quantum Information (IQI) that same year.

NSF got a surge of funding for a program they called Information Technology Research, which included a lot of practical things but also sort of a lunatic fringe of blue-sky research. And thats what we were part of, Preskill told AIP. We had an amazing group of young people in the early 2000s who came through, many of whom are leaders of research in quantum information now, like Patrick Hayden, and Guifr Vidal, and Frank Verstraete, and quite a few others.

Vidal (postdoc 0105), now a senior staff research scientist at Google, recalled those early days as a Caltech postdoc during a Heritage Project interview: John had the vision ... to hire interesting young people for [IQI], then apply a hands-off approach. Hes not the type of person who needs to control everything and everyone.

Dave Bacon (BS 97), a former IQI postdoc, remembered IQI as a leading hub for quantum computing research:

John literally started inviting everybody in the field to come visit. It was like all of quantum computing was flowing through that place, and I was in the main place we'd have the group meetings, he said in a Heritage Project interview. It felt like everybody would come in and give a talk right outside my office. It was perfect.

Liang Jiang (BS 04), a former IQI postdoc and current professor at the University of Chicago, told Zierler during a Heritage Project interview that weekly meetings were so full of discussion and questions that Preskill had to impose a time limit: You could only talk for one minute because some group members would get really excited with the results and would talk a lot about their research.

By 2011, advances in quantum computing hardware, such as superconducting circuits and qubits (the quantum mechanical analogue of a classical bit) gave Preskill and Kimble the impetus to apply for more NSF funding as a means to broaden the IQIs scope to include experimental work. They received that funding and, in 2011, changed its name to the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, for which Preskill serves as the Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of the Institute for Quantum Science and Technology.

Spiros Michalakis, staff researcher and manager of outreach at IQIM, described this name change in a recent Heritage Project interview as a visionary move, one that is still paying off: We attach Mmatterand it really mattered because we started to have conversations with how you can implement certain things and how you can convert some of the theories into experiments. I didnt know many physicists or many people who were part of physics or even mathematical physics who were not, basically, in one way or another, associated with IQIM. If you look at the roster, even now, for the second iteration of IQIM, the second cycle we have, theres a pretty cool medley of people.

As a sign of quantum computings progression at Caltech and beyond, the Institute partnered with Amazon to build the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, which opened on campus last year. The goal of the collaboration is to create quantum computers and related technologies that have the potential to revolutionize data security, machine learning, medicine development, sustainability practices, and more.

It is wonderful to see many of the graduate students and postdocs from the early days of IQIM come back to campus as senior research scientists at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, Michalakis says. IQIM brought together theorists and experimentalists with a vision toward a transformative future for all. Amazingly, we are reaping the benefits of that vision already, as the era of quantum information science and engineering unfolds before our eyes at an unprecedented pace. What an exciting time to be alive.

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The Story of IQIM: Institute for Quantum Information and Matter Caltech Magazine - Caltech