Interview: Dr. Fred Moxley, Research Fellow, Dartmouth College

What are you most looking forward to at Quantum.Tech?

It's nice to realize that our field of quantum technology has evolved from a niche curiosity in electronics to a burgeoning potential for computational and general technological supremacy. This is due to the fact that quantum science and engineering is a viable career path, whereas for our predecessors, a classical engineering path was often required in order to make a living. Today, career paths involving quantum technologies have become a viable field of study for scientific career purposes. In addition, it has the potential to act as a disruptive technology in a free and open marketplace, as well as the applicability to the aerospace and defense, and cryptography sectors as I have come to realize. Consequently, what I'm looking forward to most at this conference is the possibility of interacting with professional colleagues [such as yourselves] to get a sense of the current the state-of-the-art activity within this burgeoning field, as well as developing new relationships for enterprise and scientific collaboration.

What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the adoption of Quantum technology in 2019/2020?

A couple that come to mind include the physical process of decoherence and also the no-cloning problem. Decoherence often prevents us from performing enough operations in a discrete amount of time before the quantum state that we're working with vanishes, and the no-cloning problem prevents us from transmitting information in a reliable and efficient manner. That being said, some of the research I've been working on recently bypasses the need for worrying about these things by tricking electrons into doing things that they ought to be doing. Classical electronics has generally confined what the electrons can do.  The electronics that we are currently using in everyday life are actually pseudo-quantum computers, e.g. the cell phones and laptops that we carry around exploit something known as electron tunneling.  Electrons tunnel through junctions to perform operations, although we refer to these technologies as classical computers.  Electrons really want to do more than just tunnel through junctions, they also want to have superposition, entanglement, and behave non-locally. By letting the electrons behave as they should, we can effectively liberate them, which is something that I'm very excited about.  Give me liberty or give me a dead cat state! However, not all problems facing the adoption of quantum technology are technical.  Oftentimes investors are weary of committing funds to a nascent technology. These nascent quantum technologies need early and sustained funding in order to become a viable product.

Looking ahead a year from now, how do you see the adoption of Quantum computing progress?

I see what some of the major players in the quantum technology industry are doing, and it’s kind of interesting to see that most people are still using the dilution refrigeration technology as the foundational instrument of operation. The quantum technology that I have recently been granted a patent for actually bypasses the need for those low temperature operation requirements of the traditional dilution refrigerator. This opens up a key opportunity for us to disrupt the field of quantum technology. This is exciting in terms of the timing for improving how the quantum technology industry adapts the new performance capabilities. I'm definitely interested in discussing how this new quantum technology will influence and help shape the marketplace now and in the future.

What's going to be the biggest area of focus for your organization within Quantum over the next 12 months?

The biggest focus of our organization is converting the blueprints we have in to scalable, deliverable technologies. We are also expanding the reach of our software, and our intellectual property portfolio as well. We are primarily focused on licensing or selling the technology we have developed thus far in order to sustain research and development.

Can you share an example of how your platform or application has been used by a new customer?

Much of the contracting work I've done for my customers such as NASA, the US Air Force/Army/Navy, the National Science Foundation, and various universities has been classified. I can tell you that the technologies that we've been developing over the years has inspired a customer base including but not limited to the aforementioned list, and so obviously there is a demonstrated and financed interest in the quantum technologies we’ve been involved with.  Some of our quantum software has already been demonstrated on the DWave platform, as well as the IBM Quantum Experience. On the software side, we have demonstrated our algorithms work on existing platforms with funding from Bloomberg. On the hardware side, we continue to develop our intellectual property portfolio. Further investments should help expedite the path to market.    

Top tip: How can you best engage and support the business to adopt quantum technologies?

Quantum technologies will need to become part of the traditional stack that our customers use on a daily basis. 

Top tip: What is the best single piece of advice you can give to an enterprise looking to start their Quantum journey?

It is important to be honest with people, especially as a scientist, and from a scientific perspective. The technologies that are emerging in the quantum technology space are very high-tech, however it’s important not to embellish the capabilities of the nascent technologies. 

What are the first steps an organization can take to start making their data and networks Quantum safe?

It is of utmost importance to work with universities to train the next generation of quantum scientists/mathematicians/engineers/technologists. We need to migrate from Science Technology Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) to (Quantum) Q-STEM. The quantum technology industry will only continue to be as good as the students who enter the industry and academia. I would like to see quantum computing become a mainstream major in computer science departments.  In addition, mathematicians should be able to concentrate in quantum mathematics and theoretical physics at the baccalaureate level, and that goes for technicians as well. This might resemble the course the oil and gas industry brought about through the petroleum engineering major. We should have well trained Quantum Engineers and Quantum Programmers readily available for the tasks at hand, as well as in the future.  The industry may also want to require professional certifications in order to avoid the commonplace misunderstandings of what quantum technologies are both able and unable to provide within the marketplace and more generally. 

If you look three years into the future what do you consider will be the biggest impact Quantum technology will have on your industry?

Basically the random access memory is really what we're talking about here. It has been rigorously demonstrated in the scientific literature that the Hilbert space provided to us by quantum technologies should far surpass the random access memory capabilities of any classical machine. Along with that scientific prediction comes the potential for a new quantum industry which exceeds the current performance metrics of classical machines. 

What Quantum technology infrastructure building blocks are required to begin Quantum computing or secure communications proof of concept?

We need to get entanglement swapping in the bag. Once we do that, we can really start to scale quantum networks, and begin to start thinking about the quantum internet as a viable technology. The quantum internet will only be as good as the entanglement swapping that we use to implement it.  This will require communication of classical or quantum information across a channel and that information will have to be read in and out efficiently.  This amounts to file I/0, and we need to swap that information. This is an engineering problem as well, which further supports the need to train effective Quantum Engineers.

What is your biggest professional achievement to date?

To date, I’m happy to have been formally recognized by NASA, COMSOL, Mouser Electronics, Analog Devices, Intel, and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) as the inventor of the room-temperature qubit.

To view when Fred is speaking at Quantum.Tech, go to: https://www.quantumtechcongress.com/speakers/frederick-moxley