Quantum computing, which promises far greater processing power than current computers offer, is still in its formative stages. While companies like Google, IBM, and Microsoft are trying their own approaches to building a functional quantum computer, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is on its own track, seeking to create a quantum computer able to work on scientific problems that are too complex for today’s supercomputers.

Now a team that includes Tufts researchers has received a two-year, $4 million grant from the NSF for the effort, building on work started a year ago. The team, led by Duke University, is one of four funded by the NSF this month. 

According to the NSF, the teams “will design practical ways to expand access to the hardware and software needed for quantum science, engineering, and technology development, which are currently highly bespoke and concentrated in relatively few labs. Among the design projects are plans to create shareable, networked quantum computers that can be used for experimentation from any location.”

The end goal is to design and build a quantum computer. Quantum computing is fundamentally different from that used by standard computers, in which bits have a value of 0 or 1. A quantum bit—or qubit—can exist in a superposition of 0 and 1, allowing for very complex computing problems.

The four teams funded by the NSF this month are each taking different technical approaches—the team Tufts is on is using trapped ions, while another is employing stacks of Rydberg atoms. Only one will be chosen to build the quantum computer, work that includes potential funding of $10 million annually for up to 12 years. 

Quantum computers have the potential to solve what are called many body problems—those with many different entities interacting together, so complex that the number of calculations required are beyond the capacity of current computers to process. 

“We’re focused on applications in chemistry, high energy physics, nuclear physics, and quantum machine learning or quantum AI,” says Peter Love, professor of physics and computer science and Tufts lead in the program. “Examples would be examining the emergence of structure in matter —going from quarks to protons and neutrons, or the emergence of nuclear structure going from nucleons to nuclei, or the structure of molecules from constituent atoms.” 

Love and his Tufts colleagues will be developing applications that could run on the quantum computer, which requires different approaches than those used with standard computers.

The NSF’s National Quantum Virtual Laboratory initiative “is an ambitious effort to accelerate the development of useful quantum technologies by providing researchers anywhere in the U.S. with access to specialized resources,” the agency said.

Love notes that the NSF “is a huge supporter of science,” usually through grants to individual researchers, but also has led major scientific innovations, such as gravitational wave detectors (LIGO), which “had an amazing scientific impact,” he says. 

“NSF has a long history of creating scientific instruments that seemed impossible when they were first conceived,” says Love, a co-principal investigator on the NSF project. “NSF is the right place to develop a quantum computer that will be a tremendous scientific instrument for studying quantum phenomena from quarks to molecules.”