 So thank you all for coming this afternoon. I'm Joe Palca, and I'll be moderating this session. The session is called Beyond Moore's Law. Oh, bit of housekeeping. If you have a cell phone, please put it on silent. And we're using a hashtag for this session, which means that if you put this into your Twitter tweet, it will pop up on a screen. And if it's reasonably coherent, it will be passed on to me. And I'll read it off the screen if I don't screw it up, which I have done. So what we're going to talk about, the topic is Beyond Moore's Law. The two people who are speaking are Konstantin Novoselov, to my left. He's a research fellow in the Mesoscopic Physics Research Group, University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, right? And to his left is Robert Sholkoff, Sterling Professor of Applied Physics and Physics at Yale University in America. Now, we titled this session Beyond Moore's Law. And first, I'm assuming that most of the people in this room know what Moore's Law is. But as Robert explained to me earlier, it's a law postulated by Gordon Moore 50 years ago that basically suggested that the density of information that could be packed on a silicon chip was basically going to double for every 18 months up to a certain point. Now, the up to a certain point is a question mark, because at some point, you run into the physical limits of the amount you can pack onto a chip and you start running into things that no longer follow the seemingly clear-cut laws of physics. And they dive into these weirder laws of physics, which Robert would talk a little bit about. So the thing is, we're not going to talk about that. We're not going to talk about when Moore's Law is going to be reached. We're not going to talk about why it's coming soon or late. That's not what the topic is. We just know it's coming, and there's going to have to be something to come after that. And there are a multitude of approaches to what we're going to do to continue this incredible run we've been on of packing information and processing into smaller and smaller devices. And there are a lot of approaches, but we're going to talk about two of them as represented by Kostya and Ron. And Kostya, as you probably all know, is an expert in graphene, for which he and Mr. Keim, undergone. Won the Nobel Prize in 2010. And Rob's Nobel Prize still hasn't been awarded, but we can expect that in time. But he's been working on quantum computing. So that's where we are. And I think I'll just start by saying to you, Kostya, what do you see? What part of the future excites you? And what role might graphene play in it? Just to say first that although I've been working, I started to work on graphene 2004, probably. Currently, only 20% of my time is on graphene itself. And since then, we expanded into many other two-dimensional crystals, many other materials which are only one atom thin. And depending on the particular application in electronics or in computing, you would like to use one or another material for different applications. Or what is even more exciting is the combination of many materials. Because then you can create something which is called heterostructures, where you combine different properties of different materials. And in a combination which won't be available to you from mother nature. And then you can achieve completely novel multi-functional properties, multi-functional applications from those. So I can probably talk about them. OK, well, first maybe you could talk about why there was so much excitement around a sheet that was one atom thick, essentially, two D crystal. Well, first of all, most of the excitement came with graphene itself. And the first excitement and the major excitement for me is that it's the two-dimensional material, one atom thick. And if you would ask me 10 years ago, can you make one atom thick fabric? I would say probably not. Just all the previous experience tells you that it should decompose, it shouldn't be stable. That one was particularly stable, extremely stable. And if that is not enough, we have very unusual properties for electrons, for quasi-particles, which transfer electrical current in this material. They mimic quasi-relativistic Dirac fermions. Won't go into details. But it's something very, very unusual for electronics or for advanced metaphysicists. But then you have lots of new opportunities. And of course, then it turns out that this material is extremely strong. It's impermeable to anything, extremely stretchable, and so on. So that was for some time. But then we figured out that there are a whole class of those materials, which are only one atom thick. And surprisingly, their properties often very different from the properties of their three-dimensional, because of their three-dimensional counterparts. And exploring those properties is something very exciting for a physicist. There's no superconductivity in two-dimensions, very interesting ferromagnetism in two-dimensions, and so on. And on top of that, the recent topic, which we start to explore now, is bringing all those crystals into heterostructures. And then we design a material on atomic level. We encode different properties into this three-dimensional stack. And then we call it material on demand. You tell us which properties do you want. We can give it to you from this step. If you compare it to modern electronics to silicon, what we have now is a material which practically is electronics now, silicon. And then on top of that, we build a structure. We cut it, we etch it, we put contacts, we evaporate gates. On top of that, we create structure which has the functionality. What we are trying to do is to build materials with the functionality already built on the materials level, rather than on the structural level. So you have material which carry some information, some functions in it already. So it's a different paradigm if you want. Is there a reasonably simple answer to the question? The simple answer is, how do these new heterostructures that you're making solve the problem that is caused by the silicon three-dimensional structures? Now, I think it's a little bit more complicated than that. And I'm probably the wrong person to answer this, because there is a road map, and this Moore's law determines this road map, where do we want to be? And if you want me to answer from a physics perspective, then yes, we can. One of the transitional points for modern electronics will be to switch from the planar arrangement of our transistors, because currently what we're using, we have the silicon wafer, and we are using the planar arrangement, just those transistors situated next to each other. We can switch to vertical arrangements, and then it would bring clear benefits. For example, the length of your transistor, the effective length, we can make it into few atomic layers rather than 20 nanometer now as we've got at the moment. But what you've got to realize is that there is this road map, and before we're going to that transition, there will be many transitions before that. We will probably start introducing new materials into silicon technology first, keeping the CMOS technology there, and then bringing gradually new architecture. That's where this vertical heterostructures would come into play, and then later on probably would have to switch to completely new program, new architecture. That's where Robert would contribute, because it's a completely different mindset of computing. Okay. Well, let's speak a little bit about that. The mindset is completely different in quantum computing. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how people who don't get that can wrap their heads around it. Yeah, I can try. Thank you. As you were saying, as they keep shrinking down today's circuits, they're getting smaller and smaller, and they're approaching the atomic scale, and conventional chip makers and electrical engineers look at that and say, oh, this is a problem. The rules are changing, and the way we understand our circuits are breaking down. What we're trying to do in quantum computing is say, oh, that's not a bug, that's a feature. Let's accept that things may change, and if we kind of go to a different paradigm, let's not have a circuit which behaves in the ordinary way that electrical engineers and so on are trained, but is explicitly quantum in some sense. Then we can process information and do computing tasks and so on in a kind of new way. And quantum is giving you what properties that traditional computers don't possess. Right, well, so in a traditional computer, you represent the information as bits, and the bits are always supposed to be zero or one, they're never supposed to change on you, they're never supposed to be in an undefined state in between zero and one. The basic paradigm of quantum computing is to say, well, we'll replace that with a quantum bit, or we call them qubits, and the quantum bit has, let's say, two energy levels like an atom, which we'll call zero and one, but then we can manipulate that in different ways, and we can make new states of that quantum bit, so we can put it in a superposition, which is both the zero and the one at the same time. And that sounds maybe at first glance like a bad thing, now we don't know what the information is that we've stored, but actually a superposition is not just a random thing where you don't know if it's zero or one, it's really, according to the rules of quantum mechanics, both representing the zero and the one at the same time. And eventually then the idea of mathematically you can show is that this allows the computer in some sense to explore many different possibilities, many permutations or branches that the calculation you're doing could have taken, but all at the same time. We were talking earlier that you use fairly traditional materials to create the qubits, or to create the entities that will hold the quantum information. Is it, can you see a connection between new materials? I mean, might that offer solve some of the technological hurdles that you face, or are you still facing mathematical hurdles? No, no, I mean, I'm an experimentalist, and so there are lots and lots of practical challenges in trying to realize a useful quantum computer. And absolutely there are many materials challenges that we face and many things where new materials could really be the enabling key thing. But I guess we use, in our research at Yale, fairly conventional materials, we use silicon or sapphire chips and metallic structures composed of aluminum, but we're operating them under sort of exotic conditions, extreme conditions near absolute zero, where all the metals are superconducting, and then we can make circuits where the things in electrical engineering usually works with, like current and voltage, are actually quantum objects that need to be described with the rules that are usually applied to single atoms. So Kasia, do you have to also use exotic states to make your materials, or do they exist in more normal, you know, temperature and pressure? Well, they exist in normal temperature and pressure, although we always like to keep them at same extreme conditions go to very low temperature, then it's much easier to understand what is going on, but just to add to what Robert said, one of the reason and one of the task to, if you're trying to work with quantum computations is to create, for example, apologically protected states for, so the quantum information can be transferred and manipulated, and that's one of the most exciting topic over the last maybe five years or so, where you start finding those materials where we can't create those apologically protected states and heterostructures, which I mentioned, they also allow to create those states. So part of my job is, of course, to think about possible applications, but what really excites me most is to find those new quantum states of quantum. So who is sufficiently interested in this question to give you money to try to solve it? Well, sorry. No, no, no, you're fine. You would be surprised, but even electronic companies, I won't be comfortable to talk about, to give you names, but very large electronic corporations are interested in those new architectures. So we're not talking, so we are talking medium-time horizon beyond five, seven years, but not 20 years, which might be 15, 20 years, which might be the quantum commutation, so the horizon about 10, 15 years. And one of the outcome of our research on the heterostructures was a new type of transistors, tunneling transistors, and apparently several big corporations working around electronics are interested in those, and we work closely with them. So they're looking to solve, they're looking to the future of these sort of standard electronic devices, but to take them into the next generation to make them faster, less energy consumption, things like that. Well, I won't say that there is, that currently there is panic and that we don't know, that they don't know how to proceed, but they need to start building the roadmap for the next 10 years, and they know that they want to, and of course, as you try to look further and further into the future, you've got more and more possible opportunities, so one of the opportunity they try to, so this is one of the possible opportunities, isn't it? Right. So, Rob, you said that one of the, well, there is a similar curve in terms of the speed at which the problem-facing quantum computing is being solved, the Sholkov curve. Maybe you can talk a little bit about where we are in terms of, you said we're moving from a period of a theoretical possibility into a period where quantum computing can actually begin to, you can begin to think of it as being possible to scale up and use in a real device. Yeah, so, I mean, actually the sort of theoretical origins of quantum computing and so on were in the 1980s and 90s, and it became a very popular topic in round 1994 and 95 with the discovery of this factorization algorithm by Peter Shore, but I think the field is evolving and things are moving more quickly than we had thought at some point, so I guess five years ago I was saying, people like myself were saying, I think it's 30 years away from reality or from applications, and today I'm saying it's maybe 10 years or 15 years away, and so I think things are accelerating. So, now in terms of the Sholkov's law, there are sort of two main branches of technology that people are investigating for quantum computing. One is to use microscopic systems like single atoms or single impurities in a semiconductor or things like that, which are very microscopic. And then there's another approach which is what we specialize in that's sort of making relatively large circuits and devices that can still be coaxed into being explicitly quantum mechanical and serve as quantum bits, and for the two approaches, they're sort of two different basic problems that were faced at the outset. So, for a single atom or these microscopic devices, it was understood what their quantum mechanics was and that of course they could serve as a quantum bit. What was much less understood is how you would couple them together and connect them up into something you would imagine could process information and do a computation. Now for our approach with the larger devices, we can make many, many of them and we can array them in very complicated ways. The question there was, well are they ever really going to be quantum enough? Will they actually serve as quantum bits? And so, the place where we've seen the biggest progress is not, we haven't yet hit a Moore's law where the number of quantum bits in everyone's experiments around the world is doubling every 18 months. But for example, with our technology, the lifetime over which our qubit will stay in the state we need it to be in without forgetting has improved tenfold every two, three years. And so, it's now reaching a point where we think that's enough to let us go forward. But are you in a place where you have some conceptual hurdle that has to be cleared or are you at a place where you can tweak the parameters that you're currently working under and hope to get to the desired outcome? Yeah, so I think what we find very exciting is right now with our devices, we really believe we can build things of a complexity that's never really been done in quantum mechanics or in quantum information processing. To go to the really large scale that would help people solve computational problems, there are still issues that need to be understood better and conquered. One of the biggest ones is something called quantum error correction, which is sort of a way of keeping the computer on track so that just one error doesn't take it to a completely wrong answer. And that's something which, again, there's some mathematical understanding of but the practicalities of how you achieve that and how hard it's going to be to implement that necessary function before you can scale up. Those are really the sort of science challenges we think we need to tackle in the next five years. Right. What is the current state of hard is there an alternative to just some qubits in terms of scaling up? Sure, I mean, as a flip answer, I sometimes now say that there are as many possible qubits or proposed qubits as there are quantum systems that people know about. But some of the leading things are quantum dots in semiconductors where you can confine one or two electrons using some wires on a chip. There are things like NV centers, nitrogen impurities in diamond. There are also these interesting ideas about using novel materials, like you were saying, to realize myronophermions or other kinds of things. But those haven't been shown to be scalable yet? They've not been shown to be scalable. In some cases, we're still looking to really demonstrate the basic physics that this approach would rely on. They're very interesting pieces of fundamental physics that people are discovering all along. And that's the thing that initially drew us to the problem. But I think no one should say that they know everything they need to do in order to scale up yet. But I think the idea is that there are going to be a few approaches that will be able to move forward in the near future. I just want to remind people that if you do happen to be watching and have a question that you'd like to have me ask, send a tweet using that hashtag, morse law, even though we're not talking about morse law, you can still use it and we will capture it and it will be sent to me and I'll be able to ask the question. Kostya, when you said that 10 years ago the things you're working on probably weren't even considered possible. Well, the point is it's a relatively new field. Are you in a position now where you're simply just there's everything every day there's something new to learn about what the properties are of these crystals? Or have you moved into another stage where you've begun to understand enough about them to predict, OK, this is what's going to happen if we do that or do this manipulation with them? Well, first, yeah, so the systems which we started to work with 10 years ago, Graphene has quite a large number of the unique properties. The good thing is that lots of physicists around the world found it interesting. So we tackled this problem quite fast, I would say, and we've got very robust understanding on what is going on there. However, still every now and then we're coming across new properties and new phenomena which are extremely exciting. Now, as I said, there is a whole class of those materials which are only one atom thick. And from our experience with 3D objects, it's not always possible to predict what can you expect from those one atom thick material. You can try to think about it and you try to calculate, but sometimes it's easier to measure, in fact. And also there are a large number of those materials as well to predict which one would be most exciting. Well, it depends, first of all, on your field. I mentioned superconductivity is very interesting in two dimensions, ferromagnetism. But also sometimes it's very hard to predict what are you going to find in those crystals. Is there one that you're particularly interested in? You said that they're depending on your application, but you're more interested in the materials themselves. So is there something that got you very excited? No, I'm not a material scientist myself. And the exciting part for me is to create structures where we can put our hands on the quantum properties of electrons or quasi-particles there. And there are certain types of heterostructures which I would like to do and which I'm very excited about. Some of them may be related to what Robert is studying, like decomposing a cupopine into two coherent electrons. But there are quite a few of those structures. OK. Well, I said I'd be happy to take questions from the audience. And if anybody has one or wants to think of one, I can ask a question or two more and then you can go. Or if somebody has a question right now, feel free. There is one in Iran. Yes. Thank you so much for that incredible information and the innovation that you're driving in the work that you're doing. My question is time to market. Given sort of Moore's law of market, how are you seeing the time cycles shrinking from your research to getting into our ever shrinking hands? And what is the interest in the work that you are doing and or who is helping both accelerate and amplify the work that you are doing? Let me probably start from the beginning. Sure. Well, first of all, there are rules of physics with which we are very comfortable usually. So sometimes you can be disappointed that you cannot raise the TCE of superconductor much higher, but we are comfortable with it at least. And there are rules of economics with which we're really struggling. And I can tell you the time life of any discovery of any new technique, either the new materials like graphene or many others. Or I can even try to predict what's going to happen with the quantum computations which Robert is trying to do first. It would be very naive to expect that those electronic operations would jump and try to implement those techniques into the front end devices, into front end microprocessors. What will happen is first you would see individual transistors based on that or another technology then probably incorporate them as devices for telecommunications where single transistors would work or a single modulator would work. As we do it, we learn more about the stability of those new materials or those new technologies. You develop the new technologies and then you will be ready to incorporate it into the front end devices. Same will probably happen with the quantum information. First, before seeing quantum computers, well, we have already a quantum computer and I will probably challenge you to tell us more about that one. But you will probably see more of quantum technologies in telecommunications. And then as we use it there, we would learn more about that. And then at a certain moment, we will get ready to put it into a final device. So you won't see just an abrupt change and a bright threshold. So it will be a gradual introduction of new materials, new technology into our life. Yeah, I think I would agree with everything Kostya said. So there's quantum computing and there's quantum information in general. So a full-blown quantum computer that outperforms any conventional computer is never, I think, going to end up in some future version of your phone. It's more likely to be a very specialized thing that scientists use or that exists in the cloud somewhere and you access. But indeed, there are things such as protocols for doing secure communication and so on. And there are some small versions of these available commercially already. So I think there will be some gradual transition as well. But I think people have been predicting the end of Moore's law and that it's always 10 years away for the 50 years that it's been around. So it's maybe a dangerous thing to bet against it. But nonetheless, I think in that industry, a couple of things you have to do. You have to make sure that your next fabrication plant two years from now is also producing things that are twice as good like everybody else. And there's a path that they follow for those timescale kind of innovations. But they also need to look at what's coming ahead a decade away or so. And so I think, at least for our field, we're maybe in a transition period where I think we're going to start to see more private sector funding and interest from industry and things. Yes. I'm interested from Constantina. Do you look at the effects of gravity on what you're doing? Are you interested in that? Are you interested in doing something in space and seeing what, since there's such a business between the quantum and the graviton? It would be quite challenging experiment to do. But one of the possible experiment you can imagine you can create the thinnest possible membrane which is, and you can use it as the finest possible balance. So you can measure masses using the resonance on this membrane. Whether you would be able to catch gravitation. I think there are even publications which propose square kilometers of graphene and trying to catch gravitational waves. So I'm not really following that literature. But something which would link elastic properties and the possibility to measure really fine masses with graphene membranes would be extremely exciting. I have a question from the Twitterverse. It says, it's question seven, if you want to put it up. It says, graphene has plenty of non-electronic related applications. Are those nearer term? That's very much true. And yes, probably, or electronic related applications which are not in the front end computing but in printed electronics. So graphene is indeed extremely strong material and very elastic. And people already start to use it as a reinforcer for plastics, for composite materials. It's already being used. And you can buy products where graphene is being used. It has extremely good thermal conductivity properties. And that's another problem which we are facing. So probably one of the biggest issue is not even the utilization of our transistors, but really the heat dissipation. And as a heat conductor or a heat spreader, the paints which are based on graphene are being explored now. And there are quite a few of those. Printed electronics is extremely exciting and probably much more near term than the front end computing. OK. Do you have a question? Yes. Do you already have an idea what your research may mean to manufacturing technology? Because today's leading edge silicon wave of fares costs a billion of dollars. Can you change this game? Right. We are, as I said, people are looking forward 10 years ahead. And there are research for new materials and for new architectures. And of course, 3, 5 material like Gala-Masonite and Indian Gala-Masonite have been explored extremely broadly. Graphene and many of the other two-dimensional semi-metals and semiconductors are being studied. So we work closely with industry. They are aware of the possibilities and they are researching into it. Is there a question there? Go ahead. Bill, do you have time? I've read press accounts of quantum computers apparently in commercial operation or semi-commercial operation. But there seems to be a lot of controversy about benchmarking these, about whether they're actually computationally efficient. So I was curious why it's so complicated to find out whether something's being done better or not with these devices, or whether they even exist or this is a fiction of the press. Well, OK. So there may be several ingredients in your question. I mean, the first thing is even when you looked at the early days of original computing, as soon as people could build the hardware, it was not immediately apparent what you should do with it, how you would need it. The science of programming had to be developed once people actually had the hardware. So we don't know that much yet about the applications of quantum computing and how you should program it. And so one interesting thing that's coming out of this topic and these machines that are coming forward is sort of, let's say someone. Let's say I claim I've built a quantum computer and I hand it to you. What are the tests you do to it to see that I'm not pulling your leg, right? And so I think a good part of this debate that's going on right now is we're doing the first steps in figuring out what it takes to validate the performance of some quantum-enabled device. So there are some companies out there now. And one in particular is promoting some hardware which they sometimes describe as a quantum computer, but is a little bit different than the quantum computer that myself and then my colleagues are working on. Roughly, theirs is sort of an analog computer that is doing a quantum annealing kind of thing if you know what that means. But it's basically yet another paradigm where quantum mechanics may help in solving certain kinds of problems. But there's less, I think, known about what you really need to show in your hardware to convince someone that it's useful. So I don't think we're there yet. But these are going to be questions that will come up more and more as the time goes on. Thank you. You've got the microphone going that way. Thank you. I came here to learn something completely new. I'm totally out my depth. I've probably understood about 5% of what you've said. That's good. But that's no criticism of you. It's a comment on my own ignorance. But I found it absolutely mind-blowing, really fascinating. I want to be able to go home and explain to my nine-year-old grandson what he might be able to do when he's 25, as a result of what you're talking about, that a 25-year-old couldn't do now. Could you give me some insight into what that would look like? OK, so I'll put my stuff where I want to go ahead. So I think what becomes more and more evident now that we start to use more and more materials in our technology, say 20 years ago, Silicon Fabs would use maybe 10 of different elements now. It's half of the periodic table, isn't it? But we're going much, much, much beyond that. New materials are being utilized in modern electronics, and even your mobile phones would have very electronics which are based on very different materials, not only on Silicon. So this trend will probably continue, and we will see that materials on demand or designing new materials being more and more important, and depending on the particular application, on the particular frequency you want your transistor to operate, you will be able to compute and predict any material and try to produce it as well. So that's one of the general trends that we'll start using more materials, much more new materials than we're using now. Yeah, I think I might turn it around. So I'd say we hope we can't actually predict what's going to happen in 25 years. And if you look back, computing and information technology, 25 years ago, we're just beginning to have a lot of the things that everyone takes for granted now, like email and e-commerce and the internet and so on. So whether it's quantum computing or new materials or whatever, I think in 25 years, the way modern technology is going, the way information technology in particular is moving, it should be very, very difficult to predict. But I would hope that if you had brought your iPhone back to someone 25 years ago, he would have called you a wizard and said, how did you get this supercomputer? So I think unless there's really a shocking turn of events and everyone runs out of good ideas, which I really doubt, I think we'll have a similar kind of feeling looking back from now 25 years hence. First of all, I just want to note that it's great to have a compatriot and a fellow yearly on the panel. But my question is about this. So for me, all of this is very new. And what else should I be looking at that the most exciting things happen in physics and computing in general, either now or in the future? So what are the other breakthrough ideas that perhaps should be on the horizon of all of us? As just been mentioned, the most interesting things are those which you cannot predict. I can accurately predict the past, not the future. But generally, the quantum states of matter is a big trend in physics. And I think it will continue. I can say something I learned just yesterday. So I was in a different session where someone was talking about the capabilities of electronics and modern computing being applied to try and understand the brain. And so I think one hope also in this whole area is that maybe quantum information or maybe understanding better how the brain works will tell us just different ways that we can go about solving the problems it faces. Well, I've been listening to this discussion myself and trying to think, how do I sum this up? And how do I lay out for you the future and the direction that this is taking us? And I think it's actually quite interesting. I think this idea that we really don't know. But the fact that smart people are really paying a lot of attention to these two topics, I mean, two areas, suggests to me that there is something important there. And maybe they're wrong. And in 20 years, we'll say, well, that was a dead end. But I don't think so. And so I would encourage everybody just to pay attention and keep an eye out and expect the unexpected. Maybe that's the way to put it. But anyway, thank you all for coming and thank the panel for their great presentation. Thank you.