Quantum computing pioneer picks up national science award

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Scientist and former Australian of the Year Michelle Simmons has been awarded this year's Prime Minister's Prize for Science. It's the latest in a long line of achievements for Michelle Simmons and her team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Their work on quantum computing will enable complex problems to be solved in minutes... Rather than hundreds or thousands of years.

Transcript

00:00 A quantum computer really is a new form of computer. It's transformational. It does calculations

00:06 in parallel rather than sequential. And so it really allows us to do things that we simply

00:10 wouldn't be able to do in a useful time frame. And so there are things like drug designs,

00:15 they take about 10 years, they're very expensive processes, the chances of them working are

00:20 very low. So having a computer that can do very complex calculations in real time really

00:26 helps sort out some of those major problems that we just can't do with classical computing

00:29 right now. When we started 20 years ago, we said we want to make the smallest electronic

00:34 devices with the highest precision out of individual atoms. And at that time, it was

00:38 kind of unimaginable. People said it was impossible to do that. No one's ever done it before.

00:43 We actually were very bold. We put out an eight-stage process of how you actually do

00:46 that. How do you get a single atom into a crystal and then encode information on it?

00:50 Each of the eight stages hadn't been done. And a lot of people said, look, the chances

00:53 of doing each one is pretty hard. The chances of all of them is impossible. And so it's

00:57 been a journey with the team to just take on those really hard technical challenges

01:01 and to nail something here in Australia.

01:03 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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