The Interview: Nu Quantum CEO on how quantum computing could solve nature’s problems

Katie Prescott (0:04)

Hello, and welcome to the interview from Times Tech, our weekly conversation with the people shaping the future of technology. I'm Katie Prescott.

Danny Fortson (0:13)

And I am Danny Fortson. And this week, we are delving into the world of quantum computers, the computers which could define the next era of tech. And our guest today is Carmen Palacios-Berraquero.

Katie Prescott (0:26)

Yes, you'll be relieved, so we're swerving AI. Carmen is a quantum physicist and the founder and CEO of a British company called Nu Quantum, which is the spin out from Cambridge University, that effectively does the networking between quantum computers.

Danny Fortson (0:42)

Quantum computing for me? A little bit of a blind spot.

Katie Prescott (0:45)

I don't think you're the only one, actually.

Danny Fortson (0:47)

Yeah, I know. But I think it's one of these things. It's a glimpse into the science fiction future that hasn't quite arrived yet.

Katie Prescott (0:53)

And never seems to, right?

Danny Fortson (0:54)

Yeah, exactly. The classic five years away from being five years away. But there has been steady progress from folks like Google, et cetera, which we'll get into all of that, what's happening in China as well.

But it is interesting to hear people who are actually like, no, no, this thing is coming and it is going to change the world.

Katie Prescott (1:12)

And I would say if you're interested to know what quantum computing is, stay with us because Carmen gives a pretty clear explanation. And that is not something I say very often about quantum physicists.

Danny Fortson (1:27)

Indeed. So here is our conversation with Carmen Palacios-Berraquero from Nu Quantum.

Carmen, thank you so much for taking the time. I have questions. I have so many, many questions. Over the years, we've had various people on the podcast talking about quantum computing. And I'm going to be honest, I just still don't understand it totally. So, you know, the intro to the old podcast used to be ology, being like, what is technology? So in that spirit, what is quantum computing?

Carmen Palacios-Berraquero (2:02)

If I ignore my temptation as a quantum physicist to explain everything in the mathematically accurate way, I think there's some concepts that we can go through that are, I think, actually quite intuitive, even though quantum physics has this reputation of being completely unintuitive. But I would explain it like this. So in a classical processor, you've got bits that can only be zeros and ones, right? So arrow pointing north or south.

In a quantum computer, you've got quantum bits or qubits that can be pointing anywhere in the planet. So already you're encoding a lot of information in that uncertainty of where they're pointing, which is what we call superposition, which is really just the fact that we don't know exactly where they're pointing. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is that in a classical computer, these transistors are completely independent from each other. They don't know the state of the other.

And so if you want to run a calculation, you need to try different combinations sequentially. In a quantum computer, the bits are entangled. What that means is that they are intrinsically correlated. They know about each other's state. So taking the fact that they're pointing anywhere in that globe and that they are correlated, what that creates is a sort of massive superposed state that now means that you can sort of explore that two to the end at the same time.

Danny Fortson (3:45)

Effectively, it's just the processing power I imagine is exponentially greater than the best of the best today.

Carmen Palacios-Berraquero (3:52)

That's right. And so you can explore all answers in one computation. That's the theory, right? That's not really how, like quantum computers in reality are actually quite different from that. And there's a lot of subtleties around the hardware and the circuits and everything. But that's for me an intuitive way of understanding why they're so powerful and what sorts of problems they would be powerful at.

Katie Prescott (4:18)

I'm very curious to know how you got into it.

Carmen Palacios-Berraquero (4:20)

I'm a physicist, so I studied physics for undergrad. Before that, I had a brilliant physics teacher that was an astrophysicist and spoke to me about astrophysics and I loved it.

So I went to like physics olympiads and stuff and then I studied physics. And then I knew that I wanted to do a PhD from year one in the undergrad. I knew that what I wanted to do was quantum physics because I thought it was really beautiful. So I did my PhD in quantum optics, which is the quantum physics of light.