Quantum bootcamp
A look inside New Mexico’s quantum training lab
DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
video:
Time lapse video shows Central New Mexico Community College’s Brian Rashap setting up a demonstration on an optical table. The college and Sandia National Laboratories are establishing a 10-week training program for quantum technicians.
view moreCredit: Craig Fritz/Sandia National Laboratories
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The final touches are underway, including the installation of quantum lab equipment, as Central New Mexico Community College prepares to welcome students to its Quantum Technician Bootcamp. Students don’t need a math or science background to participate in the 10-week program.
The project, a collaboration between Sandia National Laboratories and CNM, is designed to give students the hands-on skills necessary for job placement in the industry as quantum technicians. Sandia and CNM are partnering to build the lab and develop the curriculum for the 400-hour course through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement. The first cohort will start in the fall.
“We’re leading the nation in building a quantum technician training program to get students job-ready in a semester-long bootcamp,” said Megan Ivory, a quantum scientist at Sandia. “Most students don’t get introduced to quantum until their junior or senior year of undergraduate school if they’re majoring in physics or engineering.”
Ivory is also one of the co-founders of QCaMP, which introduces quantum computing to high school students and teachers. That work will provide the foundation for the Quantum Technician Bootcamp curriculum.
“This is immersive training with hands-on experience,” said Brian Rashap, a professor spearheading the effort for CNM. “I would say 70% to 80% of the curriculum is hands-on experience.” He added that there are only a handful of quantum training programs for technicians across the country.
Training program roadmap
Sandia, a member of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium, helped lead a workshop at CNM in 2023 to delve deeper into the current needs for quantum technicians in the United States. The industry’s feedback indicated that a training program at an academic institution would be beneficial and ease some of its burden.
“We developed a report, and it provided recommendations for establishing training programs that can address some of the gaps identified,” said Jake Douglass, a business development specialist at Sandia. “The report was a big piece of getting our partners at CNM engaged to establish the Quantum Technician Bootcamp.”
Lab training space
The lab space in downtown Albuquerque is co-located with CNM’s FUSE Makerspace to provide access to a variety of tools and capabilities that benefit quantum systems. The lab is set up with optical tables that host several experiments to train in-demand skills for technicians at quantum companies.
Students will learn about lasers and photonics. They will also learn how to measure and manipulate properties of light. With hands-on work to build optical setups, they will learn about quantum phenomena such as entanglement, where two quantum particles link together in a certain way, no matter how far apart they are in space.
High vacuum training systems, such as those found at Sandia’s Microelectronics Engineering and Science Applications complex and in many different quantum systems, have been installed to provide hands-on experience working in low-pressure environments.
Finally, the photonics, vacuum systems and quantum concepts all come together in a magneto-optical trap experiment where magnets and lasers are used to confine and cool atoms for use in quantum computing, quantum sensing and quantum communication.
“We’re building a laboratory that can address many of the skills needed at national laboratories and that industry partners said they would really value in a technician,” Ivory said.
Each Quantum Technician Bootcamp is expected to include about 12 students so they can work on each experiment in small groups and get hands-on experience.
Why now?
Having a trained workforce is key especially as quantum information science taking place in research and academic laboratories begins moving into industry due to its potential for commercialization.
“Over the past decade, we’ve had a large increase in the number of quantum jobs. We don’t have enough people to fill the jobs,” Ivory explained. “We expect the demand is going to increase.”
Right now, about 57% of quantum jobs require a graduate degree, according to data from Lightcast, which analyzes the labor market. Over the next ten years, the number is expected to shrink to less than 30% as demand increases for bachelor’s level degrees or below.
“It’s important to start training programs now because it’s going to take us a while to develop that quantum workforce,” Rashap said. “Our program will provide training for quantum-adjacent fields such as semiconductor and solar cell manufacturing.”
Ivory added, “A lot of times you will see businesses and offices in places where there is a strong, trained workforce.” She hopes the workforce development programs being established here in New Mexico will result in new business and job opportunities in the coming years.
New Mexico’s role in quantum
New Mexico has a long history in the quantum field because of Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories and the academic research institutions in the state.
“New Mexico has foundational quantum programs — in ways that almost no other region does — that have enabled the rest of the quantum ecosystem. Some of the largest startup quantum computing companies used Sandia-developed technologies,” Douglass said. “We’re focusing on giving New Mexicans opportunities to engage in this field by bringing industry here.”
Providing opportunities for Americans who want to be a part of the quantum industry is a big part of planning the Quantum Technician Bootcamp.
“We want to reduce the barriers to entry,” Rashap said. “You need to know what a computer mouse is, and you need to be able to divide using a calculator. If you can do those two things, we’re going to teach you everything else.”
Ready for bootcamp
The first Quantum Technician Bootcamp is scheduled in the fall, with plans to offer the program twice a year starting in 2026.
“Our partners at CNM have taken the lead to move this project forward in ways we couldn’t have done on our own,” Douglass said. “We’re incredibly excited to partner with CNM to launch this innovative program.” He added that Sandia is looking to partner with additional academic institutions in New Mexico for quantum programs.
Anyone interested in learning more about the program can click here.
Elevate Quantum, a consortium of more than 120 organizations, is one of the main funders of CNM’s Quantum Technician Bootcamp.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia Labs has major research and development responsibilities in nuclear deterrence, global security, defense, energy technologies and economic competitiveness, with main facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Livermore, California.
To address an anticipated increase in demand for quantum technicians, Sandia National Laboratories and Central New Mexico Community College have been collaborating to create a Quantum Technician Bootcamp. Program organizers say the only pre-requisites for the course are knowing how to use a computer mouse and a calculator.
Brian Rashap, a professor at Central New Mexico Community College, sets up equipment for a quantum training lab. Sandia National Laboratories is teaming up with the college to create a Quantum Technician Bootcamp, which is a 10-week immersive program that will launch in the fall.
Credit
Craig Fritz/Sandia National Laboratories
Researchers confirm fundamental conservation laws at the quantum level
Tampere University
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Schematic of a single photon with zero angular momentum (green) splitting into two photons (red) with either zero or opposite angular momenta (sketched through the spatially varying color), which adds up to zero confirming the fundamental angular momentum conservation law.
view moreCredit: Robert Fickler / Tampere University
Researchers at Tampere University and their collaborators from Germany and India have experimentally confirmed that angular momentum is conserved when a single photon is converted into a pair – validating a key principle of physics at the quantum level for the first time. This breakthrough opens new possibilities for creating complex quantum states useful in computing, communication, and sensing.
Conservation laws are the heart of our natural scientific understanding as they govern which processes are allowed or forbidden. A simple example is that of colliding billiard balls, where the motion – and with it, their linear momentum – is transferred from one ball to another. A similar conservation rule also exists for rotating objects, which have angular momentum. Interestingly, light can also have an angular momentum, e.g., orbital angular momentum (OAM), which is connected to the light’s spatial structure.
In the quantum realm, this implies that single particles of light, so-called photons, have well-defined quanta of OAM, which need to be conserved in light-matter interactions. In a recent study in Physical Review Letters, researchers from Tampere University and their collaborators, have now pushed the test of these conservation laws to absolute quantum limit. They explore if the conservation of OAM quanta holds when a single photon is split into a photon pair.
One minus one equals zero
The conservation rule dictates, e.g., that when a photon with zero OAM is split into two photons, the OAM quanta of both photons must add to zero. Hence, if one of the newly generated photons is found to have one OAM quanta, its partner photon must have the opposite, i.e., negative OAM quanta. Or in other words, the simple formula 1 + (-1) = 0 needs to hold. While these conservation rules have been tested and utilized in a myriad of optics experiments with a laser, they have never been tested for a single photon.
“Our experiments show that the OAM is indeed conserved even when the process is driven by a single photon. This confirms a key conservation law at the most fundamental level, which is ultimately based on the symmetry of the process,” explains Dr. Lea Kopf, who is the lead author of the study.
Finding the photonic needle in the laboratory haystack
The team’s experiments rely on delicate measurements as the required nonlinear optical processes are very inefficient. Only every billionth photon is converted to a photon pair, such that measuring the conservation of OAM for single photons resembles the proverbial search for the needle in the haystack.
An extremely stable optical setup, low background noise, a detections scheme with the highest possible efficiency, and a lot of experimental endurance enabled the researchers to record enough successful conversions such that they could confirm the fundamental conservation law.
In addition to confirming OAM conservation, the team observed first indications of quantum entanglement in the generated photon pairs, which suggests that the technique can be extended to create more complex photonic quantum states.
“This work is not only of fundamental importance, but it also takes us a significant step closer to generating novel quantum states, where the photons are entangled in all possible ways, i.e., in space, time, and polarization,” adds Prof. Robert Fickler, who leads the Experimental Quantum Optics group where the experiment was performed.
Looking forward, the researchers plan to improve the overall efficiency of their scheme and develop better strategies for measuring the generated quantum state such that in the future these photonic needles can be found easier in the laboratory haystack. Moreover, the researchers aim at leveraging the generated multi-photon quantum states for novel fundamental quantum tests and quantum photonics applications such as quantum communication and network schemes.
Read the whole article in Physical Review Letters.
The Experimental Quantum Optics (EQO) group is an international research group investigating structured light, its interaction with matter on the single quantum level, as well as structured matter waves. In the broad sense, the group is interested in answering fundamental questions of quantum physics, such as high-dimensional entanglement and light-matter analogies, as well as in developing novel schemes for future quantum technologies.
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Article Title
Conservation of Angular Momentum on a Single-Photon Level
