Numbers and symbols usually fill a large white board in Raymond Laflamme’s office, but he doesn’t mind wiping off a corner to draw a tree.
It’s his way of patiently dealing with a question on a difficult topic: The Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) has been around for 10 years. How soon before we get a viable quantum computer?
“We’ve planted the seed,’’ says Laflamme, the institute’s executive director. “Now we see the leaves are coming out, and the fruit is coming out, but the tree is not mature yet.’’
That tree will get plenty of care and feeding in the Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre, the new home of the IQC and the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology. It’s an exceptional concentration of science, Laflamme says.
Based on microchips and transistors, the technology behind conventional computing can only shrink so far. Quantum computing promises a day when information will move across the infinite states of particles in the quantum realm — electrons, photons and their relatives. Quantum computers will solve tremendously complicated problems faster than even today’s most powerful processors.
While fully working quantum computers may be decades away, the world is already seeing remarkable advances in quantum communications, encryption and extremely sensitive quantum sensors. They make up some of the early fruit and leaves in Laflamme’s whiteboard sketch.
Laflamme came to Waterloo as a founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics — another byproduct of Mike Lazaridis’ commitment to transformative scientific research. A sought-after physicist and mathematician, Laflamme spent nine years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
He and colleague Michele Mosca also co-founded IQC in uWaterloo’s culture of innovation and discovery.
“Things are happening today that we would not have expected 10 years ago,’’ he says. “You put people together, give them the right tools, and you start seeing what we are seeing at IQC.”
Laflamme has a habit of beating the clock. As a young university student from Quebec, he was one of two people who compelled physicist Stephen Hawking to rethink the direction of time in a contracting universe.
And he finished a year’s worth of math assignments in two months when he started Grade 3. He thought it got him out of homework.
His teacher simply gave him more.
