Harnessing the power of Quantum Technology

Elizabeth Iwasawa: It's actually unsettling. And that's one of the exciting things about quantum physics, is it challenges a lot of what we think we know about the universe.

Shaunté Newby: Just hearing the word quantum technology can invoke visions of sci-fi and distant futures. At the quantum scale, the laws of physics we know in our daily lives are seemingly ignored. We've known about these spooky happenings at this atomic level for a while, but it's only recently that scientists have started to understand the possible applications.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: And we're basically looking at the transistor revolution that took computers from the size of rooms to something you can put in your pocket. Basically, it's that kind of you discover a new technology, you apply it everywhere and see what you can do.

Shaunté Newby: The world of quantum technology is a new frontier for the digital space, and cyber security in particular stands to have some incredibly impactful advancements. While all of this is thrilling already, perhaps the most exciting thing is that a lot of these applications of the tech are already in use. Today's episode is a fascinating one. Dr. Elizabeth Iwasawa, quantum lead at Leidos and research scientist, joins to explain to us what quantum technology means, its incredible applications, and what the future of the space looks like. And don't worry, we'll also pry her to share the secrets of quantum teleportation.

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Shaunté Newby: My name is Shaunté Newby. This is MindSET, a podcast by Leidos. In this series, our goal is to have you walk away from every episode with a new understanding of the complex and fascinating technological advancement going on at Leidos. From space IT to trusted AI, to threat-informed cyber security. We've got a lot going on and we're excited to share it with you.

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Shaunté Newby: Tell me what you do at Leidos now. What are you doing at Leidos? 

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So as the quantum technology lead at Leidos, I actually do quite a lot of things between cutting-edge physics research to creating and building up a brand new lab for us to do our research with at Leidos. A lot of it is also taking stock of the quantum technology world that we have, any options within it, and seeing what best aligns with Leidos' current strengths internally from software to cyber defense, to platform fabrication. So looking for really good cohesion between upcoming technologies and the types of customers work and skills that we already have. So finding a way of blending the best parts of quantum technology with the best parts of Leidos, which involves a lot of talking across our varied groups. From civil to defense, to Dynetics and health, and finding out what their customers are interested in, what their key concerns are, what are the biggest challenges in those fields, and seeing what ways that quantum technology can address these in new and different ways, what kind of cutting edge can we develop that will give us that advantage and that new take on a problem that really moves us forward.

Shaunté Newby: Well, a couple of things came out of that that I really... Piqued my interest with spreadsheets. I'm like a little Excel nerd, so I loved hearing about that. I'm also impressed to hear that Leidos is taking the time to build that capability within a homegrown kind of thing and investing in their talent, so that's really impressive.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: It's actually one of the reasons why I'm very proud to be there and happy to stay there, which is not something I think everyone can say because they were like, "We wanna try quantum technology, so we're going to not just invite people and tack stuff on, but we're really gonna look internally and understand ourselves, our current skills, our markets, our current employees' strengths, and then integrate quantum technology into that." And they are very invested in making sure that they leverage all of their skills internally and just make a better workforce.

Shaunté Newby: So the word quantum seems to have a really big association with sci-fi and super advanced science. But in reality, quantum technology is something that we're already finding practical applications for. We're gonna talk a lot about that in this episode, but let's start at the ground level. What does quantum technology really refer to? 

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So quantum technology is basically technology based on quantum physics. So it's anything that's really, really scaled-down and taking advantage of the super small interaction. So quantum physics is what happens when you bring the universe to the smallest scales. Really, really short time seconds. We're talking femtoseconds and shorter. Really, really short time scales. And anyone who says they can imagine it or believe it, it's mind-blowing. It's like trying to imagine how big the sun is. Our brains are just not quite capable of conceiving of these scales, so it's kind of like black hole big, but in the other direction. And when you do get to these extreme scales, you get really interesting effects from physical technology, like entanglement, which in... And superposition, which are the most famous ones from quantum physics, where you can inherently link two particles together so that no matter how far apart they are, if you do one thing to one product, well, the other one will immediately react, which greatly upset Einstein. That's the spooky action at a distance that everyone loves to get on and on about. But I think the concern was that it broke the speed of light because you see this instantaneous response between the two particles.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: And the boring answer is, you had to have separated those particles physically, so you're not beating the speed of light because you had to take a particle and slowly move it somewhere else. So you're not actually breaking any laws of physics even though it might look like it on the surface. So that doesn't happen in real life. Twins don't really... We hope. If the old science that they did early on before we had laws to regulate this, but when they would say, "Can I pinch a twin and see if the other one feels it?" That doesn't happen on the macro scale, but it does on the quantum scale. So you get that kind of effect that people were sci-fi hoping for. And then there is something called superposition, which is the sort of Schrodinger's cat question. I don't know how people are familiar with that off the top of their heads. And this is a thought experiment, so no one did this to a cat. But if you put a cat in a box with a radioactive material, radioactive decay is random. And when that material decayed, it would trigger a poison that would or wouldn't kill the cat.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: If you keep the box closed, you don't know if the material has decayed, so you don't know if the cat's alive or dead. So to your mind, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until you open the box and look at it. And this makes zero sense because we know at some point it triggered and the cat was dead or alive. And I love cats, so I'm not endorsing this kind of experiment. It was in the '30s, they had these famous thought experiments where a bunch of fancy scientists were trying to trip each other up by coming up with these wild experiments in their brains and that was the most famous of them. But what it means is, if you go down onto a microscopic scale, you know how we show electrons to you and there's an atom and it's got its nucleus and then there's these electrons and these orbits, these circles around it? What it actually is, is a fuzzy cloud where you may find an electron. And so we know it's somewhere down there, but we won't know until we measure it and find out where it is. So the superposition is, it's around this atom, most likely here, but we have to check. So the cat is an extreme example, but that's superposition. And when you have those kinds of capabilities, you enable quantum computing or quantum sensing where you can do much more advanced things by taking advantage of these weird properties that come up in super extreme scales basically.

Shaunté Newby: So when did we first start really getting into this kind of physics? 

Elizabeth Iwasawa: It's a bit of a complicated question because it's an advanced and complex enough field that I think around the 1700s, they were starting to do the very first experiments that started to suggest that something might be there. Someone's proving light's a wave, and someone's proving light's a particle, and they're not quite sure what it means. But really, it's about 100 years old. And in the early 1900s, it started to coalesce into a field. And in the '30s in Copenhagen and in Germany, there was a lot of brilliant thought going on, a lot of... If you think of the salon from the French times when all the great minds would get together, they kind of had that brilliant moment. It was one of those great times in physics when all the right people were in just the right place, comparing ideas and it advanced very, very rapidly. So it sort of started there and we went from a few people having an idea that they wrote down, things they were solving out by hand to this huge revolution that we've had today where we literally have quantum computers and quantum networks. And the quantum computer was only hypothesized like 40 years ago. So there's been this huge acceleration since then.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: It's one of the exciting things about quantum physics actually, is so much of physics that we interact with on a daily basis is known. People aren't suddenly going, "Oh look, I discovered new science right in front of my face on this scale." But in quantum technology, because we need really sophisticated devices to observe what's going on, you have these chances to discover all these new edges of physics that we haven't seen yet.

Shaunté Newby: So we've been studying this quantum physics for a long time. So some of the things you just shared, you believe those are practical applications why it's starting to gain traction now? 

Elizabeth Iwasawa: As far as studying science for a long time goes, it's a baby field 'cause it's just a 100 years old and some things are longer, but it's actually been gaining traction for quite a bit longer. If you think about lasers, those are also a quantum technology and most of us are more familiar with using them as cat toys. So when you think about things that quantum technologies can enable, you don't think about something you play with your cat with, but quantum mechanics are the underpinning of lasers, and also LEDs. For example, a fundamental understanding of how solids work on the quantum mechanical level is what enabled the semiconductor revolution and the transistors that we use today that took these huge computers and really big bulky TVs and brick cellphones and really streamlined and shrank things down to the sleek, small, fast, modern technology that we're used to today. That was all based on a better understanding of the world through quantum mechanics.

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YC: Rules are different around here.

Shaunté Newby: One of the main things we'll come to learn in this episode is that when it comes to the quantum world, the rules of physics are just different. Once you get down to that micro-scale, matter just doesn't seem to behave the same way it does in our perception of the world. What's so cool about that is it means the quantum world is a completely different playground for technology. That's what Elizabeth and other people in her field are often so excited about. But why do different rules offer new opportunities? That's something I put to Elizabeth.

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Elizabeth Iwasawa: So the exciting thing about it, as far as the tech world goes, is since it's just smaller physics, there isn't really a place that it doesn't apply. These revolutions in sensors or in capabilities are impossibly important across cyber technology, health, security. You can basically apply them anywhere if you're creative enough. Quantum computing is not at the furthest stage it could reach yet, but that doesn't mean it won't get there. And that has huge implications across cyber security, it's got huge implications for the kinds of questions that we can solve in the research we can do. These tiny magnetic sensors that we can make with quantum technology are so small and so powerful. Those enormous MRI machines that they have in hospitals. You can basically make one the size of a gallon of milk and put it on a table and do the same kind of work because you've made things smaller. The options are limitless with what you wanna do if you could make whatever you have smaller and more sensitive. But that's the flip side of some of the challenges with it, is because they're so sensitive, it's difficult to control what they're analyzing. So they can read all the magnetic fields nearby, not just the ones you wanted to focus on.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So one of our projects actually is with the University of Maryland and it's something called Hamiltonian Engineering, which is where you take a magnetic sensor that can sense every single magnetic field near it within reason. And if you want it to specifically focus on one, you can control it with a laser and manipulate the system so it can ignore every other magnetic field but one, and that's actually very difficult to do. It's easy to summarize, but it's very difficult to do. But it's part of the research into these systems, is actually making them less sensitive so that we can use them for applications.

Shaunté Newby: This is random. I recently experienced taking a loved one to the hospital and I was so surprised when they said, "Oh, we're gonna do... " I don't know if it was an X-ray or a scan, and I just thought they would have to take her to another room and they brought this device that I was like, "Oh wow, they bring it to you now." So that means it's shrunk significantly, and I'm guessing that's kind of one of those...

Elizabeth Iwasawa: Star Trek is coming.

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Shaunté Newby: That's kind of one of those relatable applications of it, of something that used to be so big and grand and now it's like you said, hand-held almost, where they can do the same work, get the same data, and get it quicker.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: And we're basically looking at the transistor revolution that took computers from the size of rooms to something you can put in your pocket, basically. It's that kind of... You discover a new technology, you apply it everywhere and see what you can do.

Shaunté Newby: So you started going down this lane. So let's talk about how Leidos works in this new technology. So what do you and your team specifically do? 

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So Leidos' main approach to quantum technology, as I think I mentioned earlier, is that we wanna leverage the skills that we already have. We want to keep supporting the customers we have, we wanna address the problems that we're currently addressing, but in a new and better way. So we are exploring a lot of avenues that relate to work that we're doing. So while it's true that Leidos is a technology company, we have our own specific strengths that we like to play to when we're looking at the broad field of quantum technology as a whole. Some of our great strengths lie in software such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and machine learning, cloud capabilities. So when we look at and think about quantum computers, we're not trying to build the quantum computing qubits themselves, but we're thinking more on a higher level of, how do we program quantum computers? What does the software on a quantum computer look like? 

Elizabeth Iwasawa: One of our research efforts right now is trying to do quantum machine learning. So machine learning as you would expect it, but using quantum computers down to things you wouldn't expect. If we start using quantum computers, how do you do a security proof on a program? How do you make sure it's not vulnerable? So it's a very broad scale of exploration to the flip side of if quantum computers become what we call cryptographically relevant, so they're very nascent technology right now. So they can't do things like break RSA encryption, which is what most people are afraid of but they are on the trajectory to do so, so you want to be prepared for that. So we are actually doing some purely classical research into what are encryption techniques that aren't vulnerable to quantum computers. How do we integrate them? How do we update all of our software to do that? What's the process? Because if you think of the amount... If you told everyone in the world that we had to change how we locked things like our doors and our cars, can you imagine how long it would take to just start that infrastructure over again? So they're not a threat now, but you don't wanna be the person standing there going, "Oops," in 10 years. You want to have the infrastructure ready to update all of your software and all of your encryption and all of your keys and signatures.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So we're looking into that, which is not even quantum related, but it's quantum focused. We have an extremely broad base of security capabilities and applications there that we can leverage. We're looking into, as I mentioned, the quantum sensing projects with Hamiltonian engineering to get these magnetometers, which can be used from everything from qubits in quantum computers to magnetometers to even potentially making a quantum memory. So sort of RAM on your computer, but with quantum technology.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So our flagship program, what I'm most excited about, is actually in quantum communications. And one of my soapboxes is that people believe that quantum communications is something called quantum key distribution, which is actually just an encryption method enabled by quantum technology. So it's quantum-derived keys and encryption that are completely unbreakable because they are truly inherently random. So most of your encryption methods are your random number generators that you have today are not inherently random. Something is driving them. And if you research and attack them enough, you can figure out the underlying pattern and break what appears to be a random number. So quantum physics is truly and inherently random. This sounds counterintuitive, but it's truly and inherently random, so we can make unbreakable keys and that's what quantum key distribution is. And then you send these via quantum particles, which I think is where the communications overlap came into it.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: But there are a lot of other ways, like can you send a message just encoded in quantum particles? What happens if you send quantum particles on your standard network? 'Cause you don't wanna have to build a whole new network on top... We don't even have fiber optics in all countries. We don't wanna start building another network when we haven't even caught up to fiber optic internet. So how could we mix it with standard communications techniques and what does it enable us and what kind of cyber-physical things can we derive from it? We mentioned earlier that a lot of these particles are very sensitive in nature, and that's the benefit and the curse. And with quantum communications, the sensitivity makes it very hard to communicate, but if you can do it successfully, it also means you're very resilient to anyone trying to eavesdrop or tamper, because you will be able to sense even the smallest amount of attack on your signal. And that is not something that can be broken because it's just physically inherent in the system.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So that's one of the big promises on that front, is that you can kind of tell all of these attacks that you can't tell classically. One of the other really cool things about quantum communications is due to this really sensitive nature, it's pretty much physically impossible to clone or copy the data. So you can basically make sure that even if someone manages to start downloading your data, if you're transmitting it via quantum signals, they'll never get a good copy.

Shaunté Newby: Wow. It's going that fast. They're getting bits and pieces, but not the whole picture possible.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: Actually, just trying to copy it destroys it. And it would be like writing a message on a piece of tissue paper and then it starts to rain. [chuckle] There it goes. It's just very, very delicate.

TITC CLIP: You don't know anything about computers, admit it. | Will you stop trying to undermine me. Now get in there and do some work to do with computers.

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Shaunté Newby: Computers are incredible. They've shaped modern life, and at this point, it would be nearly impossible to picture a world without them. But let's be honest, there isn't a whole lot of us that really know what's going on beyond the operating systems. That means we often don't even notice how significant some of the changes, upgrades, and new technologies can be. New technologies like quantum computers. For the average user, it might be difficult to imagine what separates quantum computers from what we already know. I asked Dr. Iwasawa to give us a general understanding of the difference and why quantum computers are so exciting.

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Elizabeth Iwasawa: So quantum computers are basically computers that are based on all these other physics. So we have bits in our computers, which are just zeros and ones, and that's how we encode data, if you think of binary and all of those things like that. And when you go to the quantum world, you have a qubit, so it's a quantum bit. Everything in quantum has a Q pun attached to its name somewhere generally. So these are two-level quantum states and they can be anything from a defect in a diamond, so that's called a nitrogen-vacancy center, or they can be atoms in very excited states, they can be currents going in different directions, those are annealers. So anything that can be in two states, you can use as a quantum computer basically. And so that's part of the big race that you're seeing right now, and all these different companies have a different type of qubit, a different physical system that they're trying to use. Photons are another one. So you have this one and zero paradigm that we're used to using, that's your two states. But when we talked about superposition before, where you could be every state in between zero and one or a linear superposition, so it'd be kind of like asking your computer, "Is this a zero or a one?" and it goes, "Well, it's 30% zero and 70% one. What would you like to know?"

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So you have this infinite space between zero and one of all of these superpositions that you can use and access, which means if you can manipulate the computer in the states, right, you can carry out all of your calculations at once on all of the space. And you can even then entangle your qubits to each other so that these calculations on one will impact another one. But it's very, very difficult to do this accurately because you... I mean, think about all of this power that you're trying to control and all of the space that you can look at, managing that correctly with software is very difficult. And the problem with it, and this is why quantum computers aren't the silver bullet that's gonna end everything and answer every question we've ever had, is, when we talked about Schrodinger's cat, you can do all the calculations at once, but at some point you have to ask the computer what the answer is. And then it picks one of all of these solutions and the real trick is making sure it gives you the best answer, not just any random answer. So there's a huge art form to trying to create these algorithms that use that space effectively and efficiently, and also manipulate the space so it is more likely to give you the best answer.

Shaunté Newby: And so this goes back to that mindset question, because I'm thinking about traditional science. It's black and white, right? It either is or it isn't, right? And it sounds like, it's like, "Well... "

Elizabeth Iwasawa: Generally speaking.

Shaunté Newby: "It could be this, it could be that," and you're gonna get good outcomes, but it's different. That's where I think the art comes into play, like we said earlier.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: What really actually started to upset and fundamentally challenge a lot of the early physicists is sometimes the answer that you got depended on the question you asked, which no scientist likes to see. I don't know if you've heard about the wave particle duality of light, but they talk about light being a light wave. But there is an experiment you can perform where if you just shoot this light at two slits in a wall, it will make a sort of ripple pattern on the back screen, like you would expect to see from a wave. But if you watch each photon individually as they go through these, each photon will pick a slit and you'll get a stripe of photons down one side and a stripe of photons down the other. So depending on how you observe the experiment, you get different behavior.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: And one of my favorite examples of this actually involves the electron and a father and son pair who won separately Nobel Prizes. The father, Joseph Thomson, and discovered the electron is a particle and determined its math. He's the famous plum pudding model scientist and he won his Nobel Prize for that. But his son, George Thomson won the 1937 prize for diffracting electrons, which is something you can only do with waves. So that's kind of fun for a father-son pair to prove separately, the wave and particle properties of electrons. So that's a really good experimental demonstration of how asking different questions of it gave you a different type of answer to what an electron is. And that's one of the exciting things about quantum physics, is it challenges a lot of what we think we know about the universe, that there is this observation effect that any time you try to see something, you disrupt it a little bit. We're not used to observation being a big thing, but it really... It is at that level where you have to disturb the system to look at it.

Shaunté Newby: So you already mentioned why this is so impactful in computing as far as you can't copy something, right? Are there any other thoughts on that question of why it's impactful in computing? 

Elizabeth Iwasawa: The quantum cryptographic computer, the one that can break our encryption, that's one of the biggest impacts that everyone talks about, where almost all of our encryption is based on factoring large numbers, which happens to be one of the problems that quantum computers can solve very easily. Some of the other really cool impacts of it are, you can examine very complicated systems very quickly. So you can do drug discovery or protein folding or things like that where questions that would take our computers a very long time, when they're just sort of looking at energy states and how systems interact, quantum computers are pretty good at them. So that's one of the big impacts. In quantum communications, for example, where we mentioned you can see all of these little interactions with your communications as they go back and forth. One of the biggest attacks at the moment in a cyber crypto space is that they have... It's called store then decrypt, where basically malicious actors are just downloading tons and tons of data that they can't decrypt now with the hope that, at some point in the future, they'll be able to break your encryption. But unless you notice the attack, you don't know you've been compromised.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So whenever you hear these big news articles of some bank was compromised, all your information's out there, that's because they caught someone. The amount of times that things like this happened that you don't hear about is when they didn't catch anybody. So if you have these little flags, you can start profiling, "Who's looking at what? What's being threatened? Should I be worried about it?" "Oh, they just downloaded my high school fan fiction collection. That's only a little embarrassing, who cares?" "Oh, they went after my credit card numbers, let's do something." But it also allows you to respond in real-time, because you don't have to wait for your entire transmission to finish to see these kinds of effects. So you could find out someone's trying to eavesdrop and start sending them fake information, or you could send them decoys, or you could sort of reroute them without them noticing to a different place. There's a lot of different responses that you can take rather rapidly if you enable that and these are some of the avenues we're pursuing at Leidos, so piloting those.

Shaunté Newby: This is some big-brain stuff here. [chuckle]

Elizabeth Iwasawa: It's a game changer, it moves... When we first introduced computers that revamped how... Now people's cars send them emails, which blows my mind, but it's one of these moments where you just you come up to the next level of technology and everything changes again.

Shaunté Newby: So what are some of the main things that Leidos is excited about? You started to talk about that, but what are some of those things they're excited about? 

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So I work very closely in collaboration with the cyber group on a lot of our communications research. I'm particularly excited because we are in the process of building a quantum communications lab in Reston where we can build these systems out and then demo them and interact with them, and in the truest of cyber research, leave them open to people at Leidos to attack so they can red team it and we can fight back and have a really fun interaction of trying to make these even more resilient. I am an experimental physicist, so I'm very excited to have a lab to play with in demo, but also because it makes people believe in the unicorns a little bit more if they can see them and interact with them. It's more meaningful to try to attack data and find that you can't than to have someone say, "I promise, this really works."

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So we're very excited about that, leveraging all of our cyber and intelligence capabilities. There's only so much we can really get into on a chat like this, but what you can enable with these types of technology is very, very exciting. We're excited about all of the things that we can do with quantum computing, exploring the impacts of climate change and really big complicated systems that are very hard to understand, like the weather and heliophysics and space weather, all of which impact our planet along with our current activities. So research into that, which is enabled by quantum computing, so you can take that a huge step forward and become more proactive and more understanding in that space. Those are some of our more exciting approaches.

Shaunté Newby: I heard that quantum communications lab in Reston, that's pretty exciting. And this is what I pictured, it's kind of like an indestructible challenge. So it's like people get to come in and just try to break it.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: What a lot of people like to say and what's really misunderstood is that quantum communications and quantum encryption, they like to say that it is physically unbreakable because the laws of physics basically say, "You cannot copy, you cannot disturb." But that's like the mathematical laws of physics such as they said, "The Titanic is physically unsinkable because we have derived that it is not." But you know what happened to it. It went into the real world, it interacted with real systems. So when physicists say things like that, they're going, "Assuming a perfect detector, assuming a perfect entangled photon source, assuming perfect fibers." So these laws are if everything were perfect, and so once you put them into the real world, you get these extra challenges. And that's how people are gonna try to crack and break these, is they're gonna take advantages of the inherent weakness of being in reality. I hate to put it that way. So we know that the laws of physics say it shouldn't be possible, but you also have detectors that are very sensitive that you can attack. So even if your signal is perfect and unbreakable, the thing you're trying to receive it with is not.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So there's a lot of infrastructure around quantum technologies that has its own problems, and I am very much looking forward to the red team race. So this lab is being built in the Intel DevOps Lab, so where some of our best and brightest at doing these kinds of things will be sitting there. And I think that's gonna be one of the best ways to kind of demonstrate these capabilities, is to invite a customer and say, "Knock yourself out. See what you can do. And if you break it, tell me what you did so I can fix it." People don't necessarily need to know all the laws of physics, but they've been given a new system to break and they're gonna think about it differently because they come from a different background and they're gonna approach it differently. And it's gonna be very exciting to see what comes out of that.

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Shaunté Newby: As we've learned so far in this episode, the applications of quantum technology are something we've only just started to scratch the surface of. The completely different laws of physics present so much opportunity and it's an incredible space to be in right now. It really brings in a new frontier for applications in computing and cybersecurity among others. But being so new, that also means a lot of lessons and learning curves are still ahead of us. I asked Elizabeth if this poses a challenge.

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Elizabeth Iwasawa: If you think how we deal with technology today in the class of the world, we have... Or even just building a standard computer, we have manufacturers and whole chip-based companies, and there are factories and supply chains and dedicated shipping routes, and a whole infrastructure that's set up to enable this. But quantum computing is still so new, and a lot of quantum technologies, similarly, that you have these very, very niche specialized markets and suppliers and requirements. So if there's one entangled photon source provider in the United States, that's where you're getting your supplies from. And they're also waiting for extremely specific and specialized equipment to come to them. So just like everyone else, post-COVID and during some of these current events where we're all trying to deal with some of these impacts on the entire technology industry. And beyond that, we're trying to rapidly bring some of these technologies to market to make them relevant while we're still doing active research on them, which is one of the big challenges. So quantum computers are evolving so quickly that you have physicists building them by hand in their labs and we're programming them literally bit by bit in some cases. And at the same time, industry is very excited about the use cases and the optimizations that we can do, and they want to start programming them and testing them on real-world problems.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So you have this great conflict between building and creating brand new technology and trying to use it immediately in the field, which is driving that innovation even faster, which is really exciting. But it does cause some fun challenges while we're trying to build photon sources by hand and do cutting-edge cyber technology.

Shaunté Newby: So for quantum computers specifically, I'm hearing that we've got a lot to figure out. By the sounds of it, we're on this path of trying to make quantum computers do the things we're used to. Does that focus ever detract from the possibility of the different things we can do? 

Elizabeth Iwasawa: As long as you have excited grad students in a lab, I don't think so. It's an interesting dichotomy because you want to prove that you can do things that people care about better and faster, and so there is a lot of focus on that. But there will always be another generation of physicists who hear about this, who get excited, who go, "Hey, what about this? What if I try that?" And so that application, I think, will be probably slower. I think the first thing that you'll see is quantum computers doing certain things that we were doing before much more quickly, like breaking our encryption or very, very rapidly solving for new types of medical molecules. And then out from behind that, you'll start to see these stranger uses of it that maybe we weren't expecting. It's a very difficult space to explore. So they're still even proving mathematically what kinds of questions quantum computers can solve.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: They know a bunch of them. There's a very known space, but we're still exploring... The edges are fuzzy and we're still trying to see what it can address. And some of the mind-bending things is that you can do quantum sensing with photons, you can do quantum communications, and you can do quantum computing. So you could even start seeing these dual-purpose setups where, what if your entire communications network was a giant sensor? What could you do then? You can detect earthquakes, you can detect weather changes, you can detect atmospheric key changes. Your computer will be a sensor, a really big sensitive one. And I think these kind of dual-purpose applications are what are gonna start being very interesting when you come out with them, is leveraging these systems in more ways.

Shaunté Newby: Well, let's talk about the future now. [chuckle] So there are obviously going to be a lot of challenges to overcome with something so new and complex, but with all this attention and excitement, it also feels like we're only getting started with the possibilities of quantum technology. Is there anything else you're particularly excited about? 

Elizabeth Iwasawa: I mean, you're asking a scientist, it's like, "Everything." I mean, some of these are even sillier. I'm very into quantum technology, but we can do it in space and space is really cool. So there's a lot of experiments going, "Can we do quantum communication from space? What happens if we take a quantum system up into space? What can we do with it there? What can we send?" Even within a new frontier, there's even more new frontiers that you can explore. We talk about qubits, which is that two-state system, but there is... Please forgive how silly this sounds, there are qubits, which are four states. Q-U-B-I-T. And it looks like a typo, but it's where you have a four-state bit. And so you get 64 states basically instead of a qubit and it's just these... We can start building... Since these are just physical systems, you can take an atom. The number of energy states an atom has, well, you could have... I'm not gonna come up with a ridiculous name, but you could have a 124-state bit, and then if you can superimpose all of those, the possibilities are endless. So it's just there's all kinds of wild and new ways to think about things that we're only just getting started with.

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Shaunté Newby: Now, I know we've covered a lot in this episode, and that's because quantum technology is just so big, so new, and so incredibly exciting. But I couldn't go through this whole thing and not mention quantum teleportation, which by the way is a real thing. Unfortunately, it's not exactly Star Trek-level tech, but it's still really fascinating. I had Elizabeth break it down for us.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: So this is where I get to be a disappointing scientist. We already see teleportation. It's actually done. What it is, is it's not teleportation the way you want it. So we can teleport information about a state. So if I have a qubit that's in spin-up, I can teleport that state to another qubit and make it spin up. But it would be kind of like, if I tried to teleport you, I would just teleport this sort of soup of atomic information. So it would nominally be you, but that's as much you as say the carbon and water inside you is you. You wouldn't like the other side of it. It is teleportation, but it's more of information than say matter. So we're doing it. One of the ways they're building quantum networks is with entanglement swapping and this information teleportation, but yeah, it's not something we'd wanna do to anyone or a thing at the moment.

I could teleport.

Shaunté Newby: Quantum technology is amazing, and we really only just scratched the surface of what it is, how it works, and why it's so exciting. Here's what Elizabeth hopes you take away from this episode.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: We are more in the quantum age than they think we are. We haven't enabled everything, but we have definitely enabled a lot and it's worth being aware, ready, and prepared. And that doesn't mean a PhD, that just means some general awareness, and that it is a lot more accessible than people think. My main takeaway is, please play with quantum technology. We've made it possible.

Shaunté Newby: According to you, we're already playing with it, so you've already... You've increased my awareness and I can tell now I'm gonna be going places like, "Yup, there's quantum technology, I can tell. I can tell." [chuckle] My family is gonna hate me 'cause I'm gonna probably wear them out.

Elizabeth Iwasawa: Boot up your old Blu-ray and be like, "That's quantum right there." [chuckle]

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Shaunté Newby: Again, that was Dr. Elizabeth Iwasawa, quantum technology lead and research scientist at Leidos. Thanks again for joining this episode of MindSET, a podcast by Leidos. If you liked this and want to learn even more about the incredible tech sector work going on to push humanity forward, make sure you subscribe to the show. New episodes will be live every two weeks. Also, feel free to rate and review. We're always excited to hear your thoughts on the show. My name is Shaunté Newby:, I'll talk to you next time.

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