Hello. And welcome to the Physics World Weekly
podcast. I'm Hamish Johnston.
First up in this episode, I'm in conversation
with a computer industry
veteran,
who explains why she's made the move to
the burgeoning
quantum technology sector.
Our second guest is a PhD student, who
sits on the Institute of Physics
student panel.
He talks about the Physics student experience.
What's good and how it can be improved.
And we wrap up the episode with a
chat about potential successors
to the Large Hadron Collider.
But first,
Physics World is brought to you by IOP
Publishing,
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This means that you can publish your groundbreaking
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PRGE
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p science.
As quantum technology goes mainstream,
the industry is attracting a wide range of
professionals
who are not necessarily
quantum experts.
So what's it like working in the quantum
industry as a non physicist?
I asked Margaret Arakawa,
an economist by training, who spent 25 years
working in key roles in the computing industry,
including
a 20 year stint at Microsoft.
She's now Chief Marketing Officer at US based
IonQ,
which makes trapped ion quantum computers.
I spoke to Margaret after she had
conversation.
I'm joined down the line from Seattle by
Margaret Arakawa,
who is chief marketing officer at IonQ.
Hi, Margaret. Welcome to the podcast.
Hello. How are you? Thank you for having
me.
I'm fine, Margaret, and and thanks so much
for for coming on. Now now we were
chatting a bit,
before
we started recording.
And you mentioned that, you don't really have
a a physics background.
Can can you tell our listeners a little
bit about your career
before you joined ionq?
Sure.
I am living right now right outside of
Seattle.
I came to this wonderful state,
out of business school,
to work for Microsoft. I originally thought I'd
worked there for 2 years. I ended up
working there for 20 years.
It was an exciting time. I started in
1999,
and I was able to work on pretty
much every commercial product that Microsoft sells,
with the exception of CRM. But everything else
from
I started out as
a NT product manager, so I worked on
servers,
security,
database,
Visual Studio,
every version of Windows
from,
client,
phone, as well as server in Azure, and
then Office as well as, Windows as my
last job at Microsoft.
And then prior to that, I actually worked
in several
start ups,
and that's actually why I joined IonQ. It
turns out I love
challenging problems. I like hard things when they're
not solved,
and I wanna be part of the growth
of industries.
Are there any other reasons why you were
drawn to the quantum
computing industry, and and specifically
to INQ?
I mean, you mentioned
a challenge.
Creating a quantum computer is definitely a challenge.
What what what made you, sign up for
that challenge?
Well, I spent,
I'd say, between 25, 30 years in compute
or selling what compute is. And as we
talk about it in the quantum world,
that's called classical compute.
I interned at Intel. I worked on, you
know, semiconductor
chips and marketing those,
as well
as, you know, what classical chips do when
you have an operating system hardware and applications.
That
kind of symmetry and the sort of complementary
nature of classical,
I it it was very easy for me.
In fact, when I started talking to folks
at INQ, I thought, wow, this is the
next paradigm. And I feel very much like
my whole career lived up to
learning about building ecosystems and building
industry. Because,
as you know, you know, I worked on
on premise servers, but I stayed at Microsoft
until we went to the cloud. So there's
some sea change that has to happen in
industry, and I kinda see that exactly the
same in quantum.
And and earlier,
Margaret, we we were chatting, and you you
mentioned the the satisfaction
that you get when
you you speak in front of a a
group of physicists. And they
appreciate how you've
explained some aspect of of quantum computing
in a, you know, in a simple way.
I mean, I have to say, as a
physicist, anybody who explains
quantum computing in a simple way is is
is great,
to hear.
But what are the challenges of doing that?
What what are the challenges of marketing
Ionq's
quantum hardware and its services?
Is it difficult to explain
the technology to potential customers
who may not have the appropriate technical background?
That's a really good, question.
When I was at the commercializing
quantum,
conference in London,
The moderator, the first question he asked me
was explain quantum computing to this very very
erudite audience that actually knew about it. But
I took a step back and I'll do
the analogy that I did there, which is,
when you look at your kitchen and your
cooking, and I'm an avid cook and baker.
So you have a stove,
you have a toaster oven,
You have an oven.
And then you have this crazy thing called
a microwave.
Does a microwave actually
toast toast really well? No. It's actually abysmal
and doesn't make anything brown. When you do
you use your microwave to make bacon?
Streaky bacon in the UK and, you know,
crispy bacon here in the US, no, because
it's terrible at that. But the microwave does
something that none of the 3 combined
can do faster, which is it can heat
from completely
cold out of the refrigerator
to piping hot ready to eat like no
other appliance in the kitchen. It uses a
technology that most people don't understand,
but it's so vital. I actually asked everyone
in the audience, and they sheepishly. I said,
how many people have a microwave? Everyone raised
their hand kind of sheepishly. And I'm like,
right.
It's fundamental, but it doesn't take away all
of the parts of the sort of system
of cooking. It's the same with computing.
We're gonna have CPUs, we're gonna have GPUs,
we're gonna have QPUs.
But QPUs and quantum does something in a
way that most people have never thought of,
but it does it extremely fast, extremely efficiently.
And it's game changing. So that's sort of
my first foray in why does quantum matter,
and is there an analogy on earth that
you can think of where you were surprised
by a technology that changed your life?
And, I I was at the same conference,
Margaret, and and I I really enjoyed it.
I mean, besides your talk,
what were some other highlights of of the
much. It felt very different. I just started
at INQ about 9 months ago,
and we had done an announcement, a big,
on state present with our presence with our
CEO Peter Chapman
at Quantum World Congress.
And in 9 months' time, I feel like
acceleration
of interest has been quite dramatic.
And and, you know, I was I was
in the industry when the internet was not
big. When I was still trying to convince
people the Internet was gonna be fast and
secure.
It was slow going in the beginning, and
then it accelerated.
This feels exactly the same, but in the
last 9 months, I felt
more interest,
more companies that were at the conference.
So industry
the quantum industry, we have a lot of
governments, we have a lot of quantum economies,
we have a lot of academic institutions.
But I felt more of a push from
the
organizations, the pharmaceuticals,
the, you know, the airlines, the the different
companies that would need to use,
the technologies. I feel like that's accelerating. I
I mean, what did you think about that?
It felt that way to me.
Yeah. I I I thought it it yeah.
To me, the the the most interesting thing
about the conference is,
one thing. Whenever I spoke to somebody at
the Institute of Physics booth, which I which
I spent a lot of time hanging around
because it's a great place to, to meet
some really interesting people,
Everyone that I that I chatted to, my
first question was, are you a physicist?
And, you know, I have to say that
there were very
few people who were physicists.
You know, I might get, oh, my daughter's
a physicist,
or I know a physicist.
But
most people were,
I suppose, business people or or people from
from governments, people from big companies, like Nestle
and and T Systems.
And, you know, I thought,
this is real.
You know, I'm I'm going to your analogies,
Margaret. This is this is as real as
a microwave or as the Internet.
This is something that that's going to happen.
That's
that's how I came away from it. But,
I mean, there was one message, I think,
that was mixed in.
And, you know, I think that
was the theme of the panel that you
were on.
How do you avoid overhyping
things? So
that's my next question for you. How do
companies like INQ
avoid hype and give an honest description
of the state of the art of quantum
computing?
I think from our heritage, we we aren't
a company,
you know, that tends to hype.
You know, we came out of some incredible
leadership from University of Maryland, our two co
founders, Chris Monroe, doctor Chris Monroe and doctor
Jung Sang Kim.
And so we were rooted in technology, we
were rooted in physics, we were rooted in
the science. And then we went public knowing
that this is
a technology that has the potential to change
lives, the impact of it. So we do
need to democratize
quantum and get it out there.
I do think it's interesting because the panel
I was on, you know, we had this
discussion of whether or not this is horizon
0 or 12 and, you know, some folks
will say, we still have a ways to
go.
And,
for me,
again, because I spent a career working on
technologies that
took bake time, that took ecosystems
to build, that took, you know, hardware, software
applications,
partners,
developers.
For me, quantum is now and not because
it's just me or IonQ.
So in Washington state,
we are eagerly awaiting this really famous burger
joint that's down in California.
I was reading this business article that said,
just so you know, it'll take 2 years
before this burger joint can get everything it
needs to launch in Washington.
It turns out that a typical data center
to build a new data center takes 2
to 4 years.
Data center, hard. Burger joint, easy.
But if it takes 2 to 4 years
for a burger joint or a data center,
it'll take 2 to 2 years for everyone
to start migrating from just
computer science knowledge or classical
to how do you actually work with algorithms?
How do you create applications?
Do you have the training? Do you have
the universities?
Do you have the power needed to, you
know, deploy these quantum systems?
We're gonna hit
quantum
by the time,
for us at INQ, the reason why we're
pushing so hard is we know we have
a path to
developing
hardware that within a year and a half
will exceed
what's
It will be possible on a classical,
you know, GPU enabled
simulation,
but it will be so cost prohibitive from
a power perspective.
Even INQ, we're not looking to simulate it
because,
you know, when we get to 18 kilowatts
of power on our next generation systems,
that same equivalent for
a GPU powered simulation of the same quantum
power,
it'll take a 106,000,000
kilowatts.
A million times
the power
is not something anyone wants to simulate, at
which point that's 18 months away or even
less.
So I need folks to, our hardware will
get to a point you can't simulate it
on anything classical.
We need
countries and ecosystems to start training and universities
to get classes out because we need the
applications and the algorithms. Because the power from
a quantum
hardware perspective, it will be there.
It won't beat every single workload just like
a microwave won't beat everything, but it will
be so game changing.
We need everyone to start now. It's now
as opposed
to 5 years from now.
And so peep you know, you need people.
You need very good people, companies like INQ,
in order to, to to grow.
But it's
not only physicists
and electrical engineers,
that companies need, that quantum companies need. What
advice would you give to people who who
don't have those
technical skills, or don't have that technical background,
but are really interested in quantum. You know,
they they see it as an exciting,
sector to go into.
How how would how would you recommend they
go about,
finding roles
in the quantum industry at companies like IonQ?
I think a lot of the quantum computing
companies will become very similar to any type
of
business, which means
we need people that we actually at IMQ,
to be honest, we have a lot of
PhDs and people with advanced degrees.
We have a significant portion. We have over
80 people at the company that have an
advanced degree,
which we need because we still need the
best and brightest. We have the best and
brightest. Our 3 leading engineers,
the head of engineering and software development, he
has a PhD.
We also have a PhD for r and
d and a PhD for production engineering. The
person who's actually manufacturing our quantum computers
downstairs from where I am right now, he
is a PhD from Caltech.
So we need these incredibly
bright people
to be leading the charge. But in the
meantime,
to your point about what I would say
you need as a background,
everybody on the leadership team, this is something
that our CEO really thought carefully about.
Everyone has three things that I think is
why we were hired.
Everyone has a strong academic
in whatever you're good at and whatever you
believe in. Meaning, if you're the finance person,
you have a strong impressive
academic, you know, so not esoteric, but very
hands on experience in your function.
So I was both undergrad and grad marketing,
business as well as operations. And I'm an
applied economics person.
Every one of our leadership team has that,
you know, deep background.
The second thing they have is, have they
actually worked on something really hard?
So have you worked on doing something that
was nothing that became something?
You know, we have people who started industries
that never were there before. Our head of
engineering, he works at he worked at Blue
Origin.
He was building rockets.
And then the third thing that we all
have in common is we all worked at
commercial companies that are very large.
INQ is a little different from a lot
of the other companies. We really focus on
we're building computers that we're putting in the
hands of customers
and we are about commercializing
today, not tomorrow.
So we have people who are x
Apple, x Microsoft,
x Amazon.
And our chief revenue officer, she has worked
at
Sun, Cisco, and NVIDIA.
So that why that's why it was very
easy for me to join IonQ because I
looked at my peers and I thought, these
are all people who have the academics, who
have the experience, who know how to walk
through walls and do hard things, and they
wanna commercialize.
You know, that those are the things that
so I would say every one of us
came in through our function
and do your function really well.
People are bright. You can learn quantum.
It is very difficult, but at the same
time, the physicists
will help you.
I've done up teeth conversations
where my head is spinning, but I get
the 3 basic points,
and we talk and we teach each other,
and then we get to a point where
we are able to, you know, project and
and talk about and evangelize the thing we're
working on.
Oh, that's great, Margaret. That's some fantastic advice
and and actually a very interesting insight into,
a day at a a company like IonQ.
Thanks so much for coming on the podcast
and sharing that with us. You're welcome. Thank
you very much.
2024
is a big anniversary for me. It was
40 years ago this September that I joined
the physics community,
when I began my undergraduate
degree.
My memory of those solid days is a
bit hazy,
but I do remember being more interested in
proton induced x-ray emission,
than I was in black holes.
I suppose I was an experimentalist
right from the beginning.
I was hooked on physics after just a
few weeks at university
and went on to do a master's and
then a PhD.
I was an easy catch, but what can
the physics community do to ensure that students
have the best possible experience
while at university
and develop a lifelong
love
of the subject?
Physics World's Katherine Schipper
finds out.
So, I think that many, though of course
not all, of the listeners to this podcast
will have had the experience of being a
university physics student. For many of us, it's
a really pivotal time in our lives, and
so on this week's podcast we wanted to
talk about students and the physics student experience.
Today's students have a pretty unique perspective. They're
studying in an environment that's
being rapidly changed by artificial intelligence, which looks
to revolutionize the way we work and do
research.
And many of them will remember studying or
doing exams during the COVID 19 pandemic
when schools and universities went online.
We have, quite a few readers and listeners
to the podcast who are also students,
but we realise we haven't had many students
on the podcast itself,
and we thought it was time to correct
that. Today, I'm going to be joined by
Nat Mendelsohn, who is a 1st year PhD
student at the University of Birmingham, and he
represents the Midlands of the United Kingdom on
the Institute of Physics Student Panel. The panel
has monthly meetings where they coordinate student projects
and discuss issues that are important to the
student community in the UK and Ireland.
We thought getting Nat on the podcast was
a great opportunity to check-in on what the
physics community student members are up to. Nat,
thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank
you for having me.
So, Nat, first things first, can you give
me the highlights of what the IOP student
panel has been doing over the past year
or so? Yeah. Of course. So as our
job, realistically, what we try and do is
input the student voice into the IOP. So
this is in many different ways.
We hold many events. So we hold FUSE,
which is a forum of university societies event,
where many societies and physics come together.
And we've had that and we let them
run their own workshops.
And that's really interesting. We try and encourage
collaboration.
Other stuff we have going on is PLANCS,
which stands for the physics league across numerous
countries for kick ass students.
And that's also really interesting. And the final
is was in Dublin.
The final for that is in Dublin in
Ireland.
So that's really good, but we're managing to
host that this year. We also had the
Surrey preliminary for that. So that's another thing
we end up doing.
Additionally, stuff we do is we have a
national delegation for the International Association of Physics
Students. So
many different countries or nations, territories come together.
We have an AGM, we have an EGM,
and we talk about issues physics students face,
and also events we can do
internationally. And that's really interesting to have that
input.
So we're also needing to start organizing for
future events as well, such as Fuse and
Planks. And we're always looking for host societies
and host universities as well. So there's a
lot of work we're doing. We do coding
workshops
and we do careers workshops. There's a lot
going on, and we will try and input
as much
as we can into the student community. That's
great. And so you mentioned, that part of
the panel's job is to look at the
issues that are really important to students, and
students are kind of notorious for being very
passionate about,
issues that they care about. So could you
talk to me a bit about what the
really important issues for students,
in the UK and Ireland are at the
moment?
So we've had the after effects of COVID.
So one of the issues is a lot
of students had some time out of school
or online school. So this is for new
cohorts coming in. So with that, they may
not be that used to exams. They might
have not had GCSEs or a levels. So
coming into university exams is even more stressful
than it would have already been.
Additionally,
by just speaking to lecturers, it's become apparent
that some of them may have just missed
key information in physics they wouldn't have learned
about because they weren't able to cover it
at school. And then lectures would have assumed
this is just common physics knowledge.
But it's not some of these students. And
we have a lot of issues about trying
to make everyone is
is able to understand all of these ideas
in physics, but also the fact that they're
missing ideas and who's missing what ideas. It's
so different depending on what school you went
to, what you're missing out on. And this
is a big issue we have had due
to COVID. It's just the discrepancies between students.
I think also following on from that, we've
got mental health, which we need to discuss
in physics.
It's been very hard for students. So when
so many students have had long periods of
time and they can't see people or even
new people, it's been really difficult with new
intakes of students
getting out there and meeting new people because
they're not used to that. It was hard
before COVID, but now it's even more difficult
because they've had that time of isolation
of not meeting new people. So I think
that's a major issue that students are facing
at the moment.
That's really interesting, thanks, and I know that
one of your focuses on the panel is
student societies in the UK and
Ireland,
so can you talk a bit about what
student societies
are getting up to at the moment? Yeah,
of course, so
student societies in UK and Ireland, the phys
societies are stronger than ever. We've currently just
had our 50th affiliated society within VIP,
which is really exciting.
So we hold Fuse every year,
and,
we have societies run sessions.
So
society seem really interested in outreach at the
moment.
Obviously, in COVID, it was really difficult to
do outreach. So now we're kind of getting
past that. It seems lots of societies and
students
really interested in trying to see how they
can improve their outreach.
And that's really interesting to see.
Other stuff we've seen been seeing is that
a lot of physics societies are interested in
collaboration with societies from other universities.
And this is great as well because
I was on a physics society committee for
3 years and never do we think of
this. So it's great to see that many
universities want to come together.
I know societies, they do a range of
activities. We have many different societies for different
things. We have specific societies,
but a lot of general physics societies do
social events,
educational events, careers events. But also now, VIP
has affiliated societies for specific issues.
So we've seen,
for example,
societies to have women and non binary people
in physics, and I think this is great
as well to see how we can expand
our societies for people of different groups.
Thank you. And so you've been,
on the on the IOP student panel. It's
your 2nd year? Is that correct? Yeah. It's
my 2nd year. So what has been the
highlight for you?
I mean, I've met so many different people
on the panel, and not just from the
panel, but also outside of the panel as
well. So I've had an opportunity to go
to so many different events, and I've met
so many different people. Some are students, some
not. And I've just spoken to so many
people about their
understanding of physics and also their experience of
physics. And that's really
helped me be inspired to carry on with
what I do.
I just like how I've seen so many
people who are just so passionate about physics,
and it really makes me want to carry
on in this place.
So you say that you, you said that
you wanted to continue,
you know, working in physics, and I know
you're doing a PhD at the moment. So,
can you very briefly tell me what, what
you're doing a PhD in and what you
think is interesting about it? Yes. So I
work in a very niche field, I think,
of physics.
So I do quantum optics,
and I specifically research something called quantum squeezing.
So I've kind of gone for a small
field of a small field.
I work with a tabletop experiment,
so it's really exciting. Everything I do
is on a table. It's not really collaborating.
A lot of experiments are big experiments, loads
of people. For me, it's kind of what
I do is what I do and that's
it. Like, if it goes wrong, it's either
on me or my laser. So it's quite
it's quite nice to just see what the
work I do, but
I so I work in optics. So
I just,
so quantum squeezing, just to briefly summarize it,
is we
have a error signal,
associated
with light. So this is normally called shot
noise.
So if I were to split a beam
and then I were to so
this is so hard to explain.
If I were to split
a beam
just with a beam splitter, 5050 split, and
then I were to subtract
the intensities 1 beam to the other, you
think they're equal. So if I subtract them,
my signal is 0.
But because of the fluctuations, because it's quantum,
it's not. We get some signal that's called
short noise. Now what I do is try
and get below short noise using other things,
and it's really interesting. And it's got great
applications
into imaging, and it's also got applications into
quantum computing. And I find it's really interesting
to study, and it's really exciting because it's
quite new. So yeah. Right. And so
if, if any undergrad students or postgraduate students
who are listening to this think that the
IOP panel sounds like something they they're interested
in.
Nat, can you tell us how how students
can get involved?
Yes. So we have 14 places
for the student panel for UK and Ireland,
and those are
for regions all across UK and Ireland. So,
we do put out a,
form that you can sign up and then
apply to. And you can also directly get
in contact with the student engagement officer as
well, who can signpost you on how to
sign up. But I would a 100% recommend
doing it. It's important to have a range
of students on there, undergraduates,
postgraduates,
students from different universities, Russell Group, non Russell
Group. So I'd really recommend people trying to
get involved. It's a great opportunity.
Thank you, Nat. That was, it was a
really interesting discussion. I know that a lot
of what you said resonated with me and
made me think about
my own time as a student, but it
also really highlighted
some of the particular issues that students are
facing
at the moment.
So that was Nat Mendelson, who is a
member of the IOP's student panel. Nat, thank
you so much for coming on the podcast.
Thank you.
That was PH d student Nat Mendelsohn
in conversation with Physics World's Katherine Schipper.
And I'm pleased to say that Katherine joins
me in the studio to chat about the
42nd
International
Conference on High Energy Physics,
which she just attended
in Prague.
Hi, Catherine. Hi, Hamish. So that was a
big gathering of particle physicists,
in Prague. How many people do you reckon
were at the conference?
I think at least a1000,
maybe
closer to 1500
people. So, yeah, it's
a really big conference. I think it's one
of the biggest particle physics conferences
that happens.
It was in this massive conference centre in
Prague, so I spent a week
running
around between
different sessions.
And and it was one of those conferences
with lots of parallel sessions, wasn't it? When
you you never
you never quite sure you're in the right
place at the right time. Yeah. I think
there were 8.
8?
Holy cow. If you if one of the
sessions obviously overruns by a minute,
that means that, you know, you're behind for
all of the other sessions. So you are
literally sprinting
between floors of this giant conference center to
try to get to the next talk. Yeah.
Well, that's bringing back memories of the
the, APS meetings, particularly the March meeting where
you spend all your time running around, and
you, you know, you probably walked miles
by the end of,
by the end of the day. And so
so what were the hot topics,
being discussed in some of these sessions?
I mean, I would guess that I mean,
one of the biggest topics in particle physics
right now is
what's going to replace the Large Hadron Collider?
What what's the next big particle accelerator going
to be? Were people talking about that? Oh,
yeah. Absolutely.
So I I think the thing about particle
physics is that
it's a field that operates on a scale
of many, many decades. So it's been, what,
12 years since the Higgs boson was found.
And that's not actually that long in particle
physics. So
I think the field is very much
still grappling with what's next, and I think
also is thinking a lot about
how how it's gonna fit into
the rest of society in terms of, you
know, people are a lot more conscious about
energy consumption, they're a lot more,
conscious about climate change, and how particle physics
is going to fit into that in,
you know, 5, 6 decades with the experiments
they want to build.
And yes, there was a lot of discussion
about what the next experiment is going to
be. In some of the talks
where someone was, you know, basically pitching a
small experiment they wanted to build, it felt
a bit like being sold a used car
when someone was trying to recruit,
researchers and try to attract money for their
passion project experiment that they want to build.
Because it is going to take a lot
of money, isn't it? I think it depends.
And and this is one of the things
that that people would would talk about is
if you've got a smaller experiment that you
want to build. So an example of that
would be the ship, the search for hidden
particles, which has just been approved. It's gonna
be built at CERN, I th well, it's
just been approved.
That
experiment, I think,
compared to some other experiments like the Large
Hadron Collider, it's pocket change.
But, you know, for for for,
you know, non particle physicists, it's still quite
a lot of money. It's still, you know,
1,000,000 of
of pounds or 1,000,000 of euros. It's interesting
you talk about the the environmental
aspect of of planning for the next collider.
Because I, you know, I can remember when
the LHC was first being built, it was
almost like CERN was bragging
about how much electricity
it was going to use. And, you know,
there was this talk about
competing with TGV
trains at at Geneva Station and not not
being able to run at certain times of
the year because it took so much energy.
And now, of course, it
seems to be the they're they're not bragging
about that anymore. And it's it's almost the
exact opposite that the a carbon footprint
has to be very low. But,
I mean, I I wonder how realistic that
is when you've got
all those magnets to cool and
I mean, I think it I don't have
any of these these figures
to hand, but I think some of these
experiments, when you actually put it in perspective,
it sounds like a lot of energy or
a lot of money. And actually, in the
context of everything else we use energy
for it's not it's
not actually that much, but I I did
get a sense being there that
there is a a feeling among some people
in the particle physics community that they're being
increasingly asked to
really justify
themselves and justify why we should be spending
this money
on, you know, building the next collider and
why we should be
using, you know, all of this energy,
when, you know, when
energy is so expensive,
why we should be spending that money
on building these these net generation colliders.
And, of course, you know, there's the old
nightmare scenario, isn't there, where we could build
this massive collider
and spend lots of money and energy on
it
and not really find anything
Yeah. Groundbreaking,
you know, because there's no reason in principle
why the next
collider should be the one that makes the
big breakthrough
out of the standard model.
That's right. That is precisely and there's no
reason why the most expensive colitis should be
the one that that finds something. So there
there were a lot of talks. And I
think the one that was
possibly the most,
important in terms of, you know, next generation
colitis was there was a discussion,
a panel discussion, between,
Fabiola Gianotti, who is still
the, not for long, I believe, but she
is still at the moment the director general
of CERN,
Liam Momingo, who is the director of Fermilab,
Yifang Wang, who is the director of the
Industry of High Energy Physics in China,
and Shodi Asai,
who is the director of the High
Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Japan.
And the topic of that conversation was next
generation colliders.
And I think a lot of things were
discussed, but one of the takeaways was that,
there is a big focus
on building
a Higgs factory to succeed,
you know, the discovery of the Higgs, which
would be,
an electron positron collider
that would just produce a lot of Higgs
bosons to look
for beyond the standard model physics.
This could be built as a linear collider,
which is what the,
there's been talk of building that in Japan,
and it could be a circular collider. And
in terms of circular colliders,
both CERN,
and IHEP in China have
expressed quite a quite a serious interest in
building that.
But interestingly,
there was, I think, a consensus that
you know, there's no point in having 2
of these massive colliders. So whoever builds it
first,
that will be the next big collider.
And, you know, another thing that that has
come up a couple of times in discussions
with researchers is that, obviously, depending on where
it is built,
for example, if it's built in China, that
is a consideration
that
scientists and funding bodies and governments will have
to think of
when deciding where to send researchers. Because
at the moment, for example, if you're an
American
researcher, if you're a researcher in the US,
it can be, you know, very tricky to
do,
particle physics research in China.
So that's,
that, that will be interesting to see how
that develops. And, you know, I will say
that not everyone I spoke to at the
conference was as
convinced,
that
this this Higgs factory is going to be
the next big particle collider. Some of them
are much more
focused on, you know, smaller,
you know, less expensive experiments.
But amongst the panel,
it was
or at least among amongst the, you know,
the people on the panel who have expressed
interest in building these colliders,
they they were very enthusiastic about it, and
they did seem to have a real commitment,
Yifeng Wang in particular,
that, you know,
the particle physics community in China seems to
be very,
very committed to
putting forth a proposal to build this this
big collider.
Yeah. That that's interesting. I mean, it
it seemed to be a view. I mean,
may maybe that view is slightly on the
wane in the west.
But, you know, over the past few years,
the view or there has been this view
that, well, China China's great at building things.
You know, you just have to go to
China and look at a Chinese city and
realize that they can build infrastructure
very quickly.
And, you know, also the idea that China
has lots of money, does it? I don't
know. You know, it was almost a few
years ago, it was almost certain,
that, you know, the the next
generation
collider would be built in China because they're
the only people who could do it. But
it sounds maybe that,
I mean, that was an unreal realistic expectation,
I suppose, putting that burden on the Chinese.
And it looks like maybe now the community's
coming around to,
to to looking at other options.
Yeah. The fact that we build this
big collider wouldn't necessarily mean that this is
the place where the next big particle physics
discovery
comes from. That's right. Yeah. I mean, it
could be in a lab at a university
somewhere where, you know, somebody's measuring the
electric dipole moment of the proton or something
like that, or a deep underground neutrino detector.
So, yeah, you know, very exciting. And,
yeah, it'll be you know, I have a
funny feeling that I won't be working at
Physics World
by the time the next big experiment is
built, but I'll be watching, you know, from
my rocking chair with
with lots of interest.
And and, Catherine, I'm also keen to chat,
with you about an interview that you've just
published with Hannah Stern,
who is the most recent winner of the
Institute of Physics
Henry Moseley medal and prize,
which is awarded to early career researchers
who have made exceptional
contributions
to experimental
physics.
Hannah's based at the University of Manchester.
Can you give us an idea of what
her
research is about? She's a quantum person, isn't
she?
Yes. So her research is on materials
for quantum applications, particularly
quantum
sensing and quantum networking.
So when you talk about materials for quantum
applications, I mean, if you drill down to
it, every atom and every molecule has quantum,
you know, has quantum properties. You can think
about it as a quantum object.
But the real question is,
you know, which materials have quantum properties that
can be used
in applications.
That's what Hannah's work is on. She's looking
for novel materials
that have really good
quantum properties that make them really good for
sensing. And actually what a lot of her
research
is on is on defects
in,
hexagonal boron nitride, which she's she's published,
some work on quite recently.
And it turns out that these these defects,
this is like a missing atom in hexagonal
boron nitride that
almost acts like acts like a molecule that's
trapped within the material. It has
optical transitions
that mean it can be
controlled. The quantum state can be controlled with
light. You can prepare it in a quantum
state and then
manipulate it into another quantum state and then
read out the new quantum state. And you
can also use this for sensing. So you
can
have the material on, say, a magnetic
field, and you can measure
the change,
in the quantum system as a result of
the magnetic field, again, using light, which makes
it really useful for sensing.
Oh, that's really interesting.
And and you can find out more about,
Hannah Stern's research,
by reading Katherine's interview.
You can find that on the Physics World
website.
Just look for the headline,
Hannah Stern, how new materials are driving the
quantum
revolution.
Could humans run on water?
Find out by listening to the latest episode
of the Physics World Stories podcast,
which is inspired
by basilisk
lizards
and their ability to run upright
across water to escape predators.
The podcast features
Nicole Sharp,
who's an engineer and science communicator,
specializing in fluid dynamics.
She chats with Andrew Glester
about how the lizards managed to stay afloat
while dashing across water
and explains how water running could be a
sport for humans,
but not here on Earth.
Nicole also talks about her passion for fluid
dynamics,
and her fascination
for the roles that instabilities
play in the rich behavior
of fluid systems.
You can listen to that episode
on the Physics World website,
or at your favorite podcast provider.
Just look for the headline, could humans run
on water?
I'm afraid that's all the time we have
for this week's podcast.
Thanks to Nat Mendelson,
Margaret Arakawa,
and Katherine Skipper
for taking part.
And a special thanks to our producer,
Fred Ailes.
We'll be back again next week and chatting
about the remarkable life of Abdus Salam,
who shared the 1979
Nobel Prize for Physics for his pioneering
work on the electroweak
interaction.
Our guests will be the physicists,
Claudia Duram
and Ian Walmsley.
They're both at Imperial College London, where Salam
was professor of physics for nearly 40
years. And that institution
is gearing up to celebrate
the centenary
of Salam's birth
in 2026.