Salford academic wins industry collaboration grant towards quantum tech research

Dr Stephen Church, Salford academic and Lecturer in Physics, is seeking to embed automation and artificial intelligence into the manufacture of single photon emitters, a key building block of low-cost and accessible quantum computing.

Quantum computers are a major economic and security priority for the UK government, but current solutions are expensive and difficult to run due to them needing extremely sensitive electronics to function. One way around this is to use tiny amounts of light instead.

Dr Stephen Church said: “For this to work, we need to create a single photon of light – that is the smallest amount of light that it is possible to have. For a scalable quantum computer, photons must be generated on demand with highly controlled and repeatable properties. That is super hard. At the quantum level everything is unpredictable.

“We are trying to use AI to predict which emitters will work best, but we need lots of data to train our models. This is where our lab-based automation comes into play – by measuring the properties of 1,000’s of emitters we can begin to accurately predict their properties. This is extremely ambitious, as working at the single-photon level is one of the hardest challenges in optics. The potential is huge for this kind of research – simulation with a quantum computer can be much faster and uses a lot less power. 

“This really ties into the discovery of new materials – you can simulate things down to the atom level such as how things behave and the discovery of new medicines. It opens up a whole new scope for simulating in all types of science which could lead to mass discovery and make difficult science problems more solvable.”

Working alongside Senior Research Fellow Dr Christian Clausner and quantum computing company, Aegiq Ltd, the group aim to combine Aegiq’s automated cryogenic test facilities with these AI-driven statistical tools to enable characterisation of thousands of devices to reduce manufacturing time and potentially increase performance, accelerating the path to large scale quantum computing.

This project is also supported by the Northern Engineering Robotic Innovation Centre (NERIC), who will provide access to a new £400,000 Microfabrication Laboratory built through co-funding between NERIC and the School of Science, Engineering, supporting research and teaching within SEE and commercial work in Advanced Materials.

This project will generate a dataset that describes single photon emitters with unprecedented scope and detail. This application could have significant ramifications in defence, finance and national infrastructure, and provide invaluable proof-of-principle to other quantum network projects.