Quantum Advances: NIST and Industry Drive Powerful Computing and Clocks

Credit: Vescent

Imagine what life would be like without GPS, something you use all the time without thinking about where it came from.

NIST’s atomic clock research helped bring us GPS, which has had more than a trillion dollars in economic impact.

This is just one of the many scientific breakthroughs to come out of NIST, which has an annual budget of only $1.5 billion. As a business owner who has built products based on NIST innovations, I view that as an exceptional return on investment for American taxpayers.

The steady stream of exciting technology that comes from NIST’s research will continue to provide economic and societal benefits for the U.S. 

The next frontier of this is quantum technology. Quantum is the science that describes, explains and predicts the behavior of the tiniest particles in our universe that we cannot see with our eyes alone. Quantum behaviors, such as particles existing in multiple states at once, known as superposition, are counterintuitive to our everyday experience. A concept like superposition is very different from a rule of physics we can see with our eyes, such as gravity. That’s part of what makes quantum so exciting and mysterious to me!

I love quantum not just as a scientist, but also on a philosophical and even spiritual level. 

I remember studying traditional (or what we call “classical”) physics in school. I was taught that every particle in our world had a specified position and momentum at every instant in time. So, if the world were organized only in the classical sense, there would be no free will. If that were the case, I wondered, what was the point of our existence?

Later, I took a quantum mechanics class and learned that uncertainty is actually very much a part of the fundamental rules of our universe. I was relieved to know that the world is much more uncertain — and exciting — at the quantum level.

My Journey Into Quantum

As an undergraduate studying physics, I was fascinated by molecules, lasers and all the related things. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have several excellent teachers, one of whom told me I needed to go to JILA — a partnership between NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder — to further my quantum education.

Being a student at JILA was an incredible experience. I worked with David Nesbitt on molecular physics and alongside future Nobel Prize winners for their quantum research. I later did my postdoctoral research at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where I was privileged to work with and alongside exceptional scientists like David Plusquellic, Rick Suenram, Jon Hougen, Jerry Fraser, Marilyn Jacox and too many others to mention. Surrounding myself with intellectual and scientific excellence made me better; NIST and JILA are filled with so much scientific excellence!

After completing my postdoc, I realized that I missed the Mountain West, so I returned to Colorado. After a brief stint at an optics company called Meadowlark Optics, I co-founded my company, Vescent.

One of our most exciting innovations comes directly from NIST research. Frequency combs, which were part of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics, are a unique type of laser that enables incredible technologies, such as new clocks, pollution sensors, time distribution, faster communications and many more.

I was especially excited when I read that NIST researcher Nathan Newbury had created a compact optical frequency comb that can be used outside of a lab. In fact, Nathan demonstrated it working in the back of a van driving down a dirt road! When I saw that, I knew Vescent needed to develop a product derived from this device. Our industrial-grade frequency combs have been sold around the world and deployed out-of-the-lab in places like feed lots and oil fields. Most of them enable quantum computers, and some will soon be flying in space.  

That’s how I see our role at Vescent: taking exciting innovations, improving them, making them more rugged, making them manufacturable in a scalable way, and turning them into products that improve people’s work and lives. 

Quantum’s Exciting Future

You can probably tell by now that I’m pretty passionate about all things quantum. There are so many exciting developments ahead for quantum science that I’m looking forward to in the next few years.

Remember how I mentioned GPS at the beginning of this post? GPS can be easily jammed or taken offline, and that would have devastating consequences.

However, optical clocks — which use frequency combs and operate at a higher frequency than current commercial clocks — are more accurate. Every time the world creates a better clock, exciting technological developments follow — like GPS. In fact, widely deployable optical clocks may provide a backup to GPS, which is vital considering how much of our everyday lives — from driving to air travel to financial markets to our energy grid — rely on it.

Not that long ago, people were asking if quantum computers could even be built. Now, they exist and are being used. The next step is to turn them into something that can be more commonly manufactured and shipped worldwide so more people can use them for things that are difficult or impossible to do with current computers, like designing new drugs and climate modeling.

That’s what my company is looking to do — with NIST’s support — and I’m excited to see how quantum will change our world in the years to come.