IQUIST Celebrates World Quantum Day with Science, Food, and Fun!

Observing the first World Quantum Day, on April 14th 2022, IQUIST hosted a celebration of quantum information science. As part of a national effort to promote public awareness of the positive impact quantum science has had and will have on society. IQUIST’s celebration included food, lab tours, and a poster fair where undergraduate and graduate student researchers in the field of quantum technology presented their research findings to the general public.

        

Researchers present their research at the WQD symposium.

Two of the most popular poster presentations were focused on drone-based quantum key distribution (QKD). These projects were advised by Prof. Paul Kwiat, and included a collaboration of graduate students and postdocs, undergraduates, and high school students. The project aimed to establish a protocol for QKD between two moving platforms, ultimately paving the way for a wireless quantum network. Andrew Conrad, one researcher involved in this project, described 12-hour-long drone flight tests involving meticulous set-up, experimentation, and clean-up.

A related project, also by the Kwiat group, was to establish a secure QKD link by distributing polarized photons between flying drones. To do this, the group designed and developed a source based on a polarization modulator, which was capable of encoding qubits for both narrowband and broadband lasers, resulting in astonishingly low bit error rates of approximately 1.7%. Tahereh “Tati” Rezaei noted that the most exciting part of her project was combining integrated photonic sources into a single compact source, which has broad applications for quantum communication systems, and eventually a quantum internet. These results are promising for those hoping for the development of a wireless quantum network, which take advantage of quantum properties to improve sensing, security, and computation.

 

Another top poster presentation by Seokjin Bae, Arjun Raghaven, and Vidya Madhavan, aimed to combine scanning tunnel microscopy–which is used to obtain images of atoms on the surface of materials–with photoluminescence techniques in order to characterize a single qubit and its interaction with its atomic environment. They prepared a graphite surface with nanodiamond balls, which allowed a scanning tunneling microscope to easily scan the sample and locate nitrogen-vacancies in the diamonds. The group hopes to build on these results in order to reveal a correlation between coherence time of qubits and their various atomic environments.

The celebration featured more than just poster presentations, Prof. Paul Kwiat also hosted “Lab-Escape,” a science-based escape room, as part of the World Quantum Day celebration. Additionally, visitors were invited to tour labs used for quantum research and engage with researchers in a colloquial setting. “WQD was a really exciting experience for me. It was a great opportunity to share our research activity and experience … with broad public audiences in a casual format. Despite efforts that have been made, I feel there is still much gap between what we do in the lab and what is accessible to the general public. It motivated me to think about how we can improve the way we communicate with people outside our discipline, so that we can help more people to enjoy the excitement happening around the quantum world,” says Seokjin Bae, a researcher from the Madhavan group.

This date, 4/14, is significant for its role as an approximation of Planck’s constant– 4.135667710-15 electronvolt seconds – a fundamental constant in quantum physics. World Quantum Day, was celebrated around the country, and is part a national effort to make quantum physics and the technology derived from it more accessible to the public.

These on-campus quantum celebrations are just a small part of IQUIST's effort to spread quantum education the word across the country through programs like National Q-12 Partnership, Q2Work, and Quantime, programs led by IQUIST Managing Director, Emily Edwards and her collaborators. 

Overall, the first annual World Quantum Day proved to be a huge success, affording researchers from the University of Illinois the opportunity to share their own research, learn about their peers’ projects, and engage the public with the wonders of quantum technology. IQUIST found the event to be incredibly valuable for community building and creating new collaborations and hopes to make the World Quantum Day celebration reach even more people next year.