On behalf of the Nobel Foundation I would like to welcome you to
this year's prize awards ceremony. I would especially like
to welcome the laureates and their families
to this ceremony whose purpose is
to honor the laureates and their contributions
to science and literature. And now time for
David Wineland.
I think the thing that has always interested me and continues to interest
me
even when I was first
how exposed to physics in my high school class what I liked about it
was that relatively simple math, at least simple for a mathematician,
can be used to explain how the world works.
And so I would certainly put quantum mechanics into this
relatively simple math, and what I like
or certainly one of the things I like is just the fact that when we do our experiments on these
quantum systems, these atoms, we can use quantum mechanics to
explain, you know, what goes on in the experiments
and this connection between the theory, or
theoretical explanation and actually doing the experiment
is still a, you know, I still really like that aspect.
We're always trying find ways, of course, to
improve the clocks, and sometimes that does involve
stepping back and saying well,
you know, we can't use standard practices to do things.
We need to try to invent new ways to do that. A good example
of this is back when I came to NIST to
after couple years of being here
my boss at that time, Helmut Helwig, was able to get
some money to try to do laser
cooling. Laser cooling is important because
one of the effects that shifts the observed frequency in the atoms
that we look at is the
so-called time-dilation shift, and this comes from
Einstein's Theory of Relativity
where the time for moving objects
goes slower than it does for stationary ones,
and this effect occurs at a very small scale
with the atoms that we look at, but it's an important one and we have to correct for that.
so I'll yes so we
So one of the the other areas we've been exploring is the idea of
making a quantum computer and it turns out that one of the
fortunate things is that basically
all the techniques we use for clocks turns clocks
are applicable to trying to
manipulate atoms for a quantum computer.
To implement the ideas of
making a quantum computer, it turns out that we need to
have an extreme form of cooling, so we have to,
we basically have to completely freeze out the the motion of our
trapped ions only limited by the limits of quantum mechanics.
We put them in their so-called ground state of energy and this was
this this level of cooling wasn't so necessary for
to achieve the accuracy
that we needed for the clocks, but it was critical for the, to be able to manipulate
the atoms, to try to make them as quantum bits, or qubits
and so
we had to develop a technique, and we were the first
to demonstrate that we could actually put the atoms
in the ground state of their motion
With this idea of superposition, we can put
our atoms or our ions and these states where they're
simultaneously both a 0 and a 1
at the same time. Now, why this gets interesting is
in this superposition stance, we can, with 300 bits
in a classical computer, that could store maybe a line of text,
and in our quantum computer that can store
has more memory elements than if we took all the matter
in the universe and made a
you know of classical memory,
so it's this exponential scaling that gives this
potentially very high ability
for memory and also it turns out that we can operate on all these
bits all these numbers at once with a single operation so
in some sense there's this property of massive parallelism
and that's what we're trying to take advantage of
Quantum computers are not going
to replace classical computers. In fact,
we already need a fairly sophisticated classical computer to run our
simple quantum computer. But there are certain specialized
problems. Around 1995
Peter Shor, a computer theorist,
came up with the idea. He showed that if you could make this
quantum computer, he came up with a computing algorithm where he
could efficiently factorize large numbers. Well this,
that may sound a little esoteric, but basically all
modern encryption systems, when you buy something with your
credit card on the web, you know, it's
encrypted, basically all these encryption systems would be compromised
if you have the ability efficiently factorize large numbers.
But what's I think more interesting for scientists, is
the application, for physicists in particular,
is the potential application that we might use
this even a small quantum computer
to simulate other quantum systems.
So, an example
would be, maybe popular today and
timely today, is that people are all excited about seeing the Higgs particle
but these particle systems are already so complicated they may not involve
more than tens of elementary particles
but there already, there are so many particles that we don't have, our classical
computers can't solve the quantum dynamics that goes on in these systems.
The fact that we're more generally
trying to develop methods
of metrology and measurement that are limited by
only by quantum mechanics.
You know that our work on
trying to make a quantum computer
everything we need to do that for those experiments
also improves our ability to do metrology.