 I believe physics has two goals. First, it explains nature, as you say. We try to decode somehow the world that is around us and to figure out what are the laws that govern this world, what happened in nature. That's very important. But also physics creates new things. And now it's an avalanche. Now everywhere in the world, in every university, there are research groups, research labs working on quantum technologies. And these quantum technologies, they are spreading, still invisible. And now one of the tasks we are working on is to use these superfluids of liquid light to induce superconductivity at room temperature. That would have a huge environmental impact. And it takes many hours, sometimes more than one day, to grow a structure. And that's why these kind of artificial crystals, they are much more expensive than any natural crystals, even diamonds. Then it becomes dangerous, because it means that you can crack any code that nothing is safe, no one's bank account, and also Pentagon with its nuclear arms is not safe and people with good or bad will can penetrate and maybe trigger some unwanted processes. So here it becomes more important. And that's why quantum computer is considered as a nuclear bomb of the 21st century. I know someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sokian. We are on site at the beautiful Westlake University in Hangzhou, China. We are now going to be talking about light matter coupling. We have Dr. Alexi Kovolkin joining us on the show. Hi, Alexi. Hello. Thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Thanks for inviting me. It's a pleasure. Great audience. Hope you will enjoy it. Alexi's background is so epic and I'm so excited for the content we're going to be sharing with you guys. He's the director of the International Center of Polarotonics and chair professor at Westlake University, where his research is focused on the physics of liquid light. And you can find all of his links in the bio below. Okay, Alexi, let's start things off with one of our favorite questions we like asking our guests. What are your thoughts on the direction of our world? Well, what I know professionally, I have to know things. So I know that we are going through the Second Quantum Revolution, how it is called. The first one happened at the beginning of the 20th century and it brought us Internet, video cameras, mobile phones, but also nuclear bomb and everything that surrounds us and fills our everyday life nowadays. The Second Quantum Revolution, no one, no assist so far that it's happening, but it will have a very significant impact on our life maybe in 5-10 years. So this is where we are going. I don't know exactly what is going to happen in terms of our everyday life, but more or less we know that robots are coming and also things linked with security may strongly change. I think this is the most sensible aspect because cybercrime is something that no one cares really about, but it is going to be a major problem, I think, much more important than global warming in just a few years. And the Second Revolution brings new arms, new vehicle, and it also brings new protection measures, a mechanism in this invisible war of info-crime. You know, also there is, we never know what's happening, but between countries, between big players in this world there is always some invisible fight in this information space that so far is done with use of classical weapons, what we call classical computing, but as soon as quantum computers will come into play it is like passage from conventional weapons to nuclear weapons. It's more of the same kind of transition and it will be very serious. Okay, so I like this more big history perspective on this massive advancement of the First Quantum Revolution that occurred and what incredible fruits we got from that and how physics again is pushing into new frontiers and getting this towards the Second Quantum Revolution, which I would love for you to actually unpack a little bit more. Maybe we do that a little bit later, but just, and I love your focus on both the seriousness of this because it has implications on both massive advancements for society, but also we must be ethically, morally, philosophically, spiritually wise as that happens and it's very important. Right, so everyone maybe knows that, well, can guess that people were living happily even before internet or cell phones and actually at the end of 19th century the world seemed to be perfect also from the point of view of physicists. They had a complete picture world that was self-consistent and physics was considered as a dead science. No one thought that physics will be needed and that any significant development will be coming and then there were just little signs that something goes wrong that induced some people to slightly adjust laws of classical physics like Maxwell equations for classical electrodynamics or Planck came with his quantization of energy, a quantum appeared and that was the beginning of 20th century, no one thought that this quantum may really come into everyone's life but then slowly, slowly with Einstein who explained, well, there is this purely classical relativistic theory of Einstein that he also contributed to quantum mechanics linking energy of light to the frequency of light and explaining that light is composed actually by particles, photons then there was a bore with his model of atom, then there were other physicists and slowly, slowly it has become important and when President Harry Truman discovered actually in 1945 that the United States will soon have a nuclear bomb it was a full surprise for him, so until then no one really was taken seriously that but just a few months later bombs were dropped into Hiroshima and the new epoch started so now we are also living through this period when it is invisible Richard Feynman, a great American physicist in 1950s, he was the first to propose a new way of computing that he called quantum computation, quantum computing and it was just a theoretical concept and then there were some mathematicians contributing that some quantum algorithms were proposed like Schor algorithm but it was just a game of professionals in a very narrow research field then at the end of 20th century first attempts to realize what is called qubits, the quantum bits that are needed for quantum computation were so first attempts were published and now it's an avalanche now everywhere in the world in every university there are research groups, research labs working on quantum technologies and these quantum technologies they are spreading still invisible so what is new, what is that exciting about quantum technologies? the idea of quantum computing initially was very nice that instead of doing operations one by one you know with binary logic the classical computer is medical you put in a classical computer a sequence of 0s and 1s and this is a binary code and then there are operations that transform these sequences of 0s and 1s to other sequences of 0s and 1s and at the end you take out also a sequence of 0s and 1s and this is what a classical computer does the idea of the concept of quantum computer is that you also start with a binary code but then out of these millions of 0s and 1s you make basically one state that is some linear combination, something between 0 and 1 some mixture if you have orange juice and apple juice and you mix them you can have any kind of mixture so classical computing it only recognizes purely orange juice and purely apple juice but in quantum physics we work with these all kind of mixtures and of course the variety is enormous and then miraculously when we take out the information during the readout again all these mixtures are transformed into the sequences of 0s and 1s that we can convert into video, into sound, etc. etc. so the computation is accelerated by many many orders of magnitude and so what one can ask because of course even now there are supercomputers that are more powerful than classical computers but it turns out that a simple quantum computer with maybe 50, now Google reported 53 qubits it may outperform the most powerful supercomputer that would work for years so a quantum computer in a few seconds would do the amount of work that the supercomputer would do in years and what? Ok, there are faster and slower computers of course for mobile phones today they are much faster and more efficient than huge computers in 1960s but now it comes to the problem of security because everyone uses credit cards, everyone uses internet accounts Telecommunications so everything is protected somehow by classical cryptography so usually it is always the same trick you type some password that is compared you can digitalize it, it's also a number, any password is a number and this number is usually one of the elementary factors of a huge number so you have a huge number and you need to factorize it and any classical computer spends very long time on that and the quantum computer using this short algorithm would do it in a second and then it becomes dangerous because it means that you can crack any code that nothing is safe no one's bank account and also Pentagon with its nuclear arms is not safe and people with good or bad will can penetrate and maybe trigger some unwanted processes so here it becomes more important quantum computer is considered as a nuclear bomb of the 21st century whoa, oh my gosh, okay let's go in with the quantum computing considered the nuclear bomb of the 21st century, interesting yeah because you are not supposed to kill anyone with quantum computer but you can penetrate any defense system and you can then maybe send nuclear missiles and destroy the world wow, okay so I have so many questions let's start with, you are obviously well versed in the history of physics do you feel like physics is doing the unlocking of the source code that was initially launched with the Big Bang? I believe physics has two goals first it explains nature as you say we try to decode somehow the world that is around us to figure out what are the laws that govern this world, what happened in nature that's very important but also physics creates new things so initially I started my research as a theoretical physicist and I quickly realized that it is important that you are able to explain some experimental results but it is even more important if you are able to predict something and now the quantum computer is this pure product of human brain so these great founders of quantum theories like Richard Feynman, they invented it it did not exist in nature, there is no quantum computers so it is a human creature physics is both understanding the laws that govern our reality nature and it is also the creation of this first quantum mechanics revolution which gave us the computer which is can we also say that this in a sense is a creation of nature because it came through us which is a creation of nature? philosophically yes, definitely yes creation of God if you want to say that so even the quantum computer is then also a creation of nature everything all human creations are after all nature creations and God's creations but still as a physicist I know that there are two completely different sorts of tasks one you observe something and you try to understand it and this is very important but it is more conservative or the more aggressive task you want to invent something new, test it, try it and make use of it okay so I like that distinction so we have a process of observing something and then just running hypothesis, running calculations, understanding it better over time and then there is literally creating a reality okay and so the first quantum revolution and the second are more on the creating I would say it started from interpretation of observations, results of observations so atomic theory for example the data of many experiments that provided some information on the structure of atoms so people had to come up with a model of atom so everyone knew that the universe is composed by atoms from ancient Greek time but no one knew what is inside the atom and then different models were tested like Kelvin, Bohr, et cetera, Rutherford and eventually quantum mechanics was able to provide the better model that explained all this ensemble of experimental data then the same quantum mechanics was used to propose like Einstein did lasing for example amplification of light by a simulated emission of radiation this is already a creative croc of quantum mechanics and of course nuclear bomb is also something that did not exist well it existed in short because nuclear synthesis and these kind of processes they happen in stars but on Earth it was purely invented and realized artificially how do you... I love the analogy with the orange juice and the apple juice so normal computing is either apple juice or orange juice and the quantum computing can be any combination at every single bit the miracle is when out of all these mixed states you obtain again orange and apple juice out of unoutput yes this is projection of a quantum state so you see initially you put in a classical state 1 0 1 0 0 0 1, et cetera, this sequence of numbers then quantum computer starts mixing them and you have some strange mixture but then out of this strange mixture again you extract your 0 0 1 code and this last result is really miracle of quantum mechanics because this is called quantum measurement that projects a state to some classical basis the famous example is Schrodinger's cat the quantum state is a cat that is neither dead nor alive we do not know it is in a superposition state between dead and alive but when we open the cage and we check we find either dead cat or a live cat and this is what happens also in quantum computers the readout converts the quantum state to some classical basis and in this process of the miracle happening in the black box for so many of us, that is the quantum computing that the ability to move from the normal binary into all of the unique possible mixtures and the permutational capacity of it to use that process exactly there are two sorts of problems one is purely mathematical because the binary logic is well developed since several centuries but this quantum logic it is not yet fully built there are some algorithms that are tested that may be efficient but not as many as in classical logic so mathematicians they keep working on it and they keep inventing new and new operations with these mixtures what can you do with a mixture? inverted for example instead of 65% of orange and 35% of apple you have the opposite proportion these sort of things so new and new quantum gates are proposed and this is pure theory then this needs to be implemented so we physicists we try to find material systems and there are many of them where quantum algorithms may be realized and currently there are over 10 probably different systems including superconductivity, superconducting qubits cold atoms, individual spins of whatever ions solid state physics, defects in diamond for example photons, that is my field and many more molecules etc everything is tested as a platform for realization of quantum, technology's quantum computation it's not yet clear who will win which material platform will be chosen will be the most efficient wow, what a cool also in a sense of race that's happening with the second quantum revolution of which style of quantum computing is going to be most efficient or could different forms be used for different applications effectively that's... I have another question the question is about do you feel like the amount of potential like you warned us earlier that the potential malevolence that could be unleashed with the quantum computational power do you feel like our best way to hedge against that problem is to work on ourselves like morally, spiritually, ethically, philosophically so we can learn how to use the technology on the good side of it or do you feel like going really hard on the security side of it or do you feel it's a combination of both, how do you feel? I feel that so far the protection systems it's not about human psychology it's about physics again and the systems are being developed this is what is called quantum cryptography so instead of classical cause that will be easily cracked now many countries develop systems that use so-called quantum key distribution and China by the way is the most advanced now in this area they have the world first quantum satellite now flying around the globe and this is what does the quantum satellite do? quantum satellite is a device where you generate pairs of so-called entangled photons photons that are like twins they know each other, they remember each other even if they are very far so the satellite sends two photons one goes for example to Beijing and another one goes to Moscow or Washington and this provides so these photons they encode they carry the code for communication so you send your encrypted message through the classical channel by internet, email, whatever but it is encrypted using the code that you receive from satellite and if you send the message you have the same code as a guy whatever in Washington who receives the message because it comes from the same satellite and it is encoded with this twin pairs of photons and if someone intercepts one of two photons the other one will feel it immediately so you will just take it out and you will be able to only choose safe pairs of photons that no one intercepted this makes it very secure this kind of communications and it exists already there is no yet the worldwide quantum internet but I hope it will be built maybe in 5-6 years You said that human psychology doesn't really play that big of a deal we just have to build the quantum encryption systems that are going to protect like the quantum satellite that's going to entangle photons to protect communication we have to build all of the security measures because we don't feel like we can trust human psychology Right, so it's a question of funding Human psychology, so decision-making mechanism depends of course on human psychology and politicians who give money to this or that branch of research they are human beings so far I think the approach generally the approach of main players like the US, China, Europe, Russia it is very conservative so money is given for defense systems and probably much more than for these dangerous systems but we don't know I know one can tell you for sure that there is no any private research group who would really dig into realizing these dangerous applications of quantum technologies Do you also consider it to be possible and what would you say would be the proper trajectory if so with human psychology developing deeper morality and ethics and philosophy and spirituality to the extent at which we make it super disincentivized, period to ever behave in a malevolent way to try and intercept the communications or behave poorly with the quantum technologies in a way we can maybe not need to go so insanely hard on the security side of it Well, realistically I don't think that the whole population of this planet will become so good that I always have someone who is tempted to do something bad to others and I think this is in human nature and it's difficult to eradicate it entirely so I think this is the reality that will and we have to take it into account so we should build our protective measures I don't believe that any government nowadays is really willing to destroy the world this I don't believe but there are certainly dangerous individuals who may have this or that goal that is potentially dangerous for everyone and also both happening at the same time is great conscious evolution for humanity away from malevolence while we also do some of the advanced security measures of quantum cryptography Alexi, I want to know more about your journey it's really interesting hearing about your father also being a physicist also your son, one of your children your son is a physicist as well seems to be like a lineage of physicist will you tell us about you growing up and how you got interested in physics I was born in the Soviet Union and effectively my father was a professor and he did some experimental research in hydroacoustics so it was something familiar to me from the childhood my elder brother who is seven years older than me he has chosen physics so it was quite natural for me to follow the steps on the other hand I always wanted to do also other things like literature, drawings, music, chess so physics is not the only thing in the world but it is interesting, it is challenging fortunately in the Soviet Union there were very good schools so I was fortunate to be graduated from one of these schools specialized in physics and mathematics and mainly actually, well, two fields medall recent fields medall winners this is the highest distinction in mass from the same school, Perilman and Smirnov so that's a really good education so then the Soviet Union collapsed and with all this education we had nothing to do because economically it was a disaster you know the researchers in the Academy of Science they were paid on a level of maybe $20 per month so everyone, either you have to be wealthy but not so many people in the Soviet Union were wealthy or you had to look for another job, that is a PT or you had to go abroad and I went abroad like many thousands of Russian scientists so I worked in France, I worked in Italy I worked in UK and then now you know the world of physics is very international it is not that important where you work because always you are in contact with people all over the globe that's very exciting, this is one family and we do not have any, for example, political tensions in the world of research, absolutely nothing so yeah, this is how I come to China China is really exciting now it invests so much in fundamental science it offers a really fantastic environment and this is a country of great civilization also they had difficult times in 20th century but they managed to educate many good students abroad and now these students are coming back already as grown up researchers and they take leading positions in universities in China so the level of science in China is growing very rapidly in contrast with what we see in Europe, Russia and even in the US it's not growing on that speed I would say so yeah, China now is one of the most exciting places in the world to do research agreed so this is a part of the story of the rise and collapse of some of the that's been happening for civilizations since we started so there was a collapse and you went and you continued doing your research you had this drive towards the fundamental science of physics and so you went and you continued doing work in Europe and you actually spent, this is important to mention you spent 13 years from 2005-2018 right before your move to Hangzhou at Westlake as the chair of nanoscience and photonics and professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Southampton so during that process before this move to China what were some of the big exciting things that you were doing and teaching and working on? well, in 2007 the group of researchers at the University of Southampton published the first paper on, now it will be a technical term Bose-Einstein condensation of polaritons at room temperature but I explain what it is so it is again something with Einstein Einstein predicted that there are two sorts of particles in the world fermions and bosons fermions do not like each other they never stay in the same state but bosons do like each other and at very low temperatures bosons come to the same quantum state that is a state with the same energy same speed, same momentum just a quick pause this is at CERN where you are colliding particles well, in CERN they definitely study elementary particles but to obtain these condensates you probably need a different experimental environment it is not, you do not need accelerators because you need to cool them down to very low temperatures in accelerators they are very very hot but I mean at the end of 20th century in Cornell University and in MIT people managed to observe these condensates of atoms atoms may be bosons as well but at temperatures of tens of nano-kelvins so it is one billionth part or one over 100 millionth of kelvin and one kelvin, now we are sitting at the temperature of 300 kelvin that's the temperature that's the temperatures it was a great discovery, they got Nobel prizes but completely useless because no one would work at that temperature only in laboratories you can achieve so low temperatures so then in 2007 we have shown that the same phenomenon with different kind of objects can be realized at room temperature and I think it is very very exciting when you bring the physics that was known to be very very exotic that only existed in very specific laboratory conditions when you bring it to everyday life, to ambient temperature this opens huge fantastic field of applications and from 2007 till now in these 12 years probably several hundred researchers came into this field and again in all major universities in the US, in Europe, in Asia people studied this phenomenon and this is all about liquid light, so polaritonics my center here is the center of polaritonics so polariton is this particle that we managed to condense to put many thousands of them into one single quantum state where this huge amount of particles behave like one so imagine you have cars on a motorway and you traffic jam because all cars move with different speed and some of them are very slow and then others come and then jam is forming now imagine if all of them move with the same speed exactly the same, ten thousand cars or one million cars never traffic jam, this is superfluidity this is what is called superfluidity and this is what we observe at room temperature with this polariton that's incredible so I think this was my... I was not the only one working on that but I was a theorist of the group and this is one of my most interesting research works I would say and all subsequent works were actually the development of this one superfluidity of which particle? polaritons polaritons yes okay, and polaritons are? a quantum of liquid light so light, you know, light... we all see light, right? it's something that comes from sun but light is... can be described as a flow of particles that are photons, the quantum of light the sun all the time is shining photons in all directions even these lights are shining photons yes, yes, yes, everyone, yes and do you see the world that way? do you see... yeah, this is a quantum mechanical picture of the world light is composed by billions of billions of billions of quantum that are these photons and light of different color, for example red photons are different from blue photons this is about the property of photons a slightly different wavelength yes, yes and wavelength frequency momentum these are all characteristics of photons but, okay, these particles, these photons they do not interact with each other they basically they all propagate with the same speed and they are described by laws of optics now what we study is what happens with light when it enters into semiconductor crystals artificial crystals made of semiconductor materials like gallium arsenide, for example so light entering inside does not disappear but it changes its properties strongly so it propagates inside the crystal but it also interacts when propagating with crystal excitations so called excitons and this is how pyrotons are born that's how pyrotons are born so when the light enters a crystal structure then it gets coupled so you can see like light photon is absorbed it disappears for a short moment and something changes in the crystal so some electron gains energy and goes up in energy for example then this electron comes back and the energy is released again in the form of a photon and again it is reabsorbed but from the point of view of quantum mechanics there is no separate photons and separate excitons excited states of electron but there is some mixture against Schrodinger-Kett neither that nor life so it is not matter, it is not light but some mixture, some liquid light some liquid light mixture, light-matter coupling exactly and this was a discovery by you and a bunch of others well, as any discovery it has many fathers so pyrotons theoretically they were predicted in 1950s, 1960s and then they were studied in different materials and structures but our contribution was that we have shown that at some conditions these pyrotons they all come to the single quantum state that is this Bose-Einstein condensate and this is very interesting because in single quantum state what it means it is like single particle, single object this is what I told you about the cars they all move simultaneously they all behave like insects if you have a lot of insects flying then they copy movements of each other so the same happens with these photons so you started observing liquid light that was turning into a super fluidity super fluid of light super fluid of light and then what then did when you guys were there seeing this happening what were you immediately thinking about regarding why this is so important what it can be used for? we had several ideas of potential applications one of the first was about superconductivity as you know it's one of major challenges of physics since the discovery of superconductivity in 1911 everyone dreams of finding material where superconductivity would exist at room temperature because superconductivity means that you pass electric current and there is no losses and this potentially can save you tens of billions of dollars and also there are some fantastic applications like interstellar flights and these engines that would be much more efficient than anything one can imagine now so this is not yet resolved and this is one of the major challenges of physics but if the super fluidity of liquid light exists at room temperature I think it really shows that also superconductivity may exist at room temperature because two phenomena are very very similar and now one of the tasks we are working on is to use these superfluids of liquid light to induce superconductivity at room temperature that would have a huge economical impact one more time saying the last part again this would have a huge economic impact the superconductivity if it is realized at room temperature at temperature like here now then it would be a new industrial revolution so the superfluidity of light matter coupling makes superconductivity yes I tell you the difference between two superfluid is electrically neutral and the superconductor is a superfluid of charged particles so it can carry electric charge that's why current that propagates without any viscosity so without any resistance and that's something that is used in accelerators for example huge magnets or here in China you have a train going from Shanghai airport to the city this maglab it is based on superconductivity so it levitates it does not touch trails but all this is achieved at low temperatures and if you would be able to do the same at room temperature it would have enormous economic impact and now let's talk about this move so much of this physics is incredibly complex to me and to so many others and it's great hearing you aiming to make it so relatable but it's just so complicated at the same time with oh man it's not really complicated I think cooking for example is more complicated than physics if you want to become a good chef really you need to be much more talented than you would need to become a good physicist I don't know about that I'm pretty sure because there are more factors you know intuition plays in the kitchen I like cooking myself I know how little we can rely on recipes on written rules you should have feeling physics is more straightforward there are rules you just apply them oh my gosh who would have thought okay let's talk about so let's see on this let's see what we can do here so the discovery of polarotonics was around 2007 and you have the this is the physics of liquid light light becoming liquid because it couples to matter and then that process is critical for superconductivity could unleash a massive paradigm and these are things that are now happening with you and your lab this is one of the goals not the only one and let's talk now on this transition so okay you mentioned earlier that you found the amount of fundamental science being done in China to be really important I do too tell us more about that and about what is happening here with you directing the International Center of Polarotonics as well being a chair professor here at the university why you're here I started a little bit more than one year ago but everything here at the Westlake University is very new because the university did not exist until last year and this is very exciting because rarely you have an opportunity to build a center on your own design from scratch from nothing so I was given funds to build we are now building several labs and I'm hiring people there are two more professors in our center and some research scientists and students are coming so hopefully in one year we'll be about 30-35 it's already a big lab and for my research field for this physics of liquid light it is a unique opportunity to bring together the growth technology we need to grow our artificial crystals where we fabricate this liquid light it's not natural crystals you need reactors to make them how do you grow the artificial crystals? atom by atom this is called molecular beam epitaxy basically you have three sources in a vacuum chamber that send different atoms like aluminum, gallium and dorsinicum and they send them basically one by one you grow the structural mono-atomic layer by mono-atomic layer you can control it up to the position of every single atom and this is an expensive machine but this is something that exists in many countries the machines name one more time? molecular beam epitaxy molecular beam epitaxy molecular beam epitaxy you can take different atoms and then have them create you put them they form a crystal lattice they form a crystal lattice but how does you so you can take the atoms and have them one by one form this crystal lattice and it's like it's like 3D printing it's kind of 3D printing yes you can print different kind of shapes three-dimensional shapes pyramids for example and you just feed it whatever atoms you want it to print? no no it's not that simple because for every sort of atoms you need its own source and then usually in the typical chamber you have just three or four sources so you cannot grow any material you want when you buy this machine you need to choose already the materials the materials the machine is made do you know which company makes the oh many many many companies make them and then they tailor the manufacturing of the machine based on which atoms you want to print so you're creating artificial crystals what is the size of these crystals what is the internal lattice structure because how do you maximize the success of the light matter coupling so the crystal is grown substrate that may be a couple of inch diameter and there you start covering by this very thin monatomic layers of the structure that you are interested in and it takes many hours sometimes more than one day to grow a structure and that's why this kind of artificial crystals that they are much more expensive than any natural crystals even diamonds so then you have a structure that is very thin anyway it is thinner than human hair but you know precisely how it is organized which layer goes after which layer and this is where you can observe some interesting physics a couple inch plate has a monatomic layered crystal that is less than the size of a hair which is about 50 microns so actually the substrate itself it is not that thin it may be I don't know 0.1 millimeter if you will 100 microns but then on the top of it we grow a structure that is typically several microns thick just maybe 3-4 microns and what is that structure on the top? well structures we are using are called micro cavities these are kind of if in elevator sometimes they put mirrors and you see your reflection from both mirrors so light goes between two mirrors back and forth this is same principle but on a micro meter scale which is what makes it so the photon goes between the two between two mirrors and the light matter coupling just continues happening yes, the photon doesn't go out the thing is that it remains inside and then it couples more efficiently with some crystal excitations and the crystal excitations come from the container that it's in? the fact that it's in this artificial crystal that's being made well in any crystal crystal is made by atoms and in atoms you have electrons in crystal what happens many atoms are close to each other so electrons can jump from one to another so they form kind of C so an excitation is when you take one electron from this C and you put it on an energy level so what remains in this C it remains this empty place where you took it that is called hole hole it is a scientific term and it can be described also as a quasi-particle with a positive charge so this hole and this electron they attract each other they interact so it tends to come back but during some time it leaves a buff on this level above and then it falls down so this process it can be repeated many many times with emission or absorption of a photon and this is how it all works this is how the polarity appears now is the let's get a little bit more technical here is the photon coupling with the electron when it connects with with the crystal lattice everything happens in a crystal a crystal is like a forest you have these trees and you you walk below the trees then you have a squirrel an electron in the squirrel that jumps from one branch to another and then I don't know what analogy I can use I don't know so if you're shooting something and you shoot it to the squirrel and the squirrel jumps up but then the squirrel shoots the same ball to you and jumps down etc so this is then it jumps from one tree to another and propagates the squirrel is the photon the squirrel can be also the electronic excitation because the electrons in the crystal they are free to move it was interesting hearing you say that us manufacturing artificial crystals because there is none of them that are naturally evolved that we know of are more expensive than diamonds yes and so every time you spend a day printing one of these it's extremely expensive yes okay and then there could you could we hypothesize that there are other crystals that we could make that could also assist us with really hard physics challenges yes this is what this is how this science develops so people have ideas about new design of new crystals we now theoretical unit for example we always propose designs then these designs go to the gross laboratory they look at them and they say rubbish it cannot work and then we come up with a new design and finally they take one and say okay we'll try to do something about that and then they grow a structure and then our optical lab is performing all kind of measurements and then we see it is not what we expected and then we go back to them and say no you have grown some rubbish structure it's not what we wanted and they say oh yes we forgot this this is how this goes forward and what do you guys get from the study of the light matter coupling how do you take that and go to superconductivity how do you take that and go to photonic quantum computing how does that translate to that right this is exactly about designing different sorts of structures so for superconductivity what I need I need to take a superconductor that already exists and that has so called critical temperature so superconductivity is achieved below some temperature and above this temperature it's a normal metal that is not interesting so critical temperature for superconductivity is very low and this is a problem our challenge is to make it higher so we cover our photonic structure our micro cavity with this layer of superconductor and we try to optimize the design of the sample in such a way that the super fluid of liquid light helps superconductivity in this structure and the critical temperature goes up if we manage to see it we are the happy winners but it's not yet done for quantum computing it's a different design we need to make this qubits you know the mixture of orange and apple juice we need to do it with our liquid light so basically we mix light that imitates orange juice with light that imitates apple juice and we need to be able to operate with that and control this liquid this requires different sort of structures that we engineer and we produce what do you hypothesize is the crystal design that your team needs to make superconductivity well we usually start from intuition and this is what makes us closer to this chef in kitchen but then of course with only intuition you cannot go to the gross lab and run this set up that costs many million dollars so after this first intuition we do simulations we do computer modeling and we usually do not grow immediately the complex structure that would be the final one but we try to do it step by step element by element we do tests and only when we are completely sure that all together it will work we assemble it and we go for the final experiment it's like launching something into the outer space you would not just build it and launch you really need to be sure that all your equipment works as it should so many of the leaders that we now interview on the show use simulations in some way shape or form and it's fascinating now thinking about how many industries that it's entering into people are using it in order to be more efficient yeah and do you feel like you can leverage the computational capacity of of running all of the permutations of crystal structures to see what could be optimal you know this is interconnected because quantum computers they are very promising also for simulations for creation of new materials this is their peaceful function they are not only dangerous but they they can be useful for something and especially for superconductivity because superconductivity needs very complex structures and classical computers even supercomputers fail to predict their properties so we so far we do not rely on that much on the computer power we are doing it is not an industrial research we are doing a pioneering research and some proof of concept experiments and for this basically small work station can fulfill our needs but I imagine that when it passes on to companies like Google or IBM then they will switch on all the supercomputing power to optimize the structure because when you start mass production you really put billions on stake and you want the best of the best and then what are so would you say priority number one is designing the crystal that is priority one yes yes maybe first you should have an idea you should realize you should formulate what you want to achieve but once you formulated it and you have a concept then you come up with the design of the structure and then priority two is helping to move that process along of the light matter coupling towards superconductivity and photonic quantum computing right so once you have structures you need also to perform experiments that would be proof of concept experiments it's also a complex task and you would not have immediately a quantum computer for example you start with a single qubit and then two then you assemble together three, five etc okay I have a question how does the light matter coupling become the first qubit you see one of the designs we are working on is so called split ring resonator it is like half moon croissant growing moon so crescent so here what happens we have currents in this the super fluid currents in this crescent that go this way that oscillate so if we say that current going clockwise is our state one current going anticlockwise is our state zero it's our basis and we achieve superpositions of these currents so it's not going only clockwise or only anticlockwise but it goes simultaneously in both directions and this is a qubit and then how does it take all of the states between the mixture of orange and apple juice then it depends how you prepare it we do it now with optical control so with lasers we set up the face of this oscillating currents as we need and then we also need to provide the readout that is much much much tricker we do it with some interferometry techniques on a nano scale so this is challenging and not yet entirely done and this is the central goals of the lab one of what's the next no I mean I mentioned two the superconductivity and quantum applications I can mention the third one it is physics of monoatomic chains of carbon this is something where we are really world leaders in monoatomic chains of carbon is that graphene? no graphene is a two-dimensional crystal in graphene you have a plane full of atoms yes a chain but why would you use just the chain instead of the 2D oh it has many many advantages it is the thinnest wire you can imagine the thinnest wire that we can imagine for example so then for any kind of quantum applications there is a quantum wire where electrons pass one by one so electric current is quantized it is not it does not change gradually but it changes step by step like that so this is a very interesting object but it's very challenging because it's not easy to make it to grow it this is inflexible you mean so why you can potentially bend it a single a single monoatomic I can bend this monoatomic yes you can it is the most rigid wire because the distance between carbon atoms is just 1.2 angstrom so it's very very small they stick to each other very well so it's very rigid but you can still bend it fold it okay and the you have to you have to are you using the same machine except with carbon a similar style of machine no that's different this grows with lasers in a liquid in a colloid and first we basically decompose some target crystal into fragments and then we extract this virus and then we stabilize them attaching gold nanoparticles at the ends and then we deposit it because to use it you need to put it on a substrate that's some technology that is actually also revolutionary technology we are now preparing several papers on that I hope that will be the first in the world to demonstrate this and apparently it's easier to make lasagna you know virus is really challenging and not much is known about that this is purely experimental in theory here is not of much help because you cannot foresee everything okay and then so these are the three yes okay these are the three for the lab now how do you take the the team right now is 10 you will be seeing it grow over time to around 30 35 how do you how do you end the 10 and the amount of limited amount of time that you have and all of the complexity that you have to achieve with doing the simulation modeling first of the designs of the crystals and then to conduct the actual light matter coupling and then to see if you can go to the stages of superconductivity photonic quantum computing and then also doing this other task with the mono atomic carbon that's a lot of stuff for 10 people how do you figure out who's doing what in this process well first of all we collaborate with many labs across the world and with Southampton by the way I keep very good ties and with labs in Switzerland in Italy in Russia and we have theorists coming from New York so it's an international network basically that that tries to solve this problem so we are not alone these 10 people is just maybe a nuclear but there are many others who are involved okay we can't forget about the children's books so Alexei has authored 10 children's books now and this is the newest is that right yes our chronists chronicles and the children's books inspire children into history science yes yes you know I have 4 children and initially I was writing for them but then it turned out that it is of more or less general interest this particular book I was challenged by a friend of mine to write a book on formula 1 races that's challenged by a friend yeah that so he told me that it should be understandable so people should understand why it is so interesting and what is the science behind these races because there is a lot of science involved here and it should also promote his company that is called Acronis so that's why the main character of this book is an 11 year old girl who is called Acronis and her brother is a famous pilot of F1 and there is some muffin also there is a lot of adventures in this story and I hope it is very funny and easy to read but also it contains a glossary where terms like pit stop pit lane explain and there are drawings that illustrate everything and you learn from this book what kind of ties for example these cars need and how often you need to change them during the race so that was the first challenge and then he changed me for the second book that is closer to what I was talking about today that's Acronis and Quantum Computer and that one will be published hopefully before the end of this year wow Acronis Quantum Computing wow and I love your true multidisciplinary man to be able to take and make such complex subjects starting with you know Formula One getting all the way up to Quantum Computing this will be very interesting to see how you synthesize and disseminate at the level of the child that will be very interesting Alexey what is the meaning of life of this big human experiment you know I had a professor when I was a student in Russia and he was from Armenia like you so he as any Armenian professor he was very good in making speeches at the table when we had parties so I remember his thoughts about the sense of life he told us students in physics that everyone wants to be happy in this world but it's not interesting for a scientist for a scientist the sense of life is success so if you have chosen this field of activity you are supposed to be successful this is your goal be successful in your research so I think it is very true in my case and for my colleagues really sometimes we forget our families we forget to eat we forget to sleep because we want the result and the success in science is very important for us and that also speaks to the importance of identifying what your gift what your unique gem is that you can bring the world and just go after that with an insane amount of appetite and hunger and go do you think this is a simulation no I think it's rarity of no science you know science is a real game it is a game but it is about real things it's all like our life it's also a sort of games but it is real and it makes it interesting and last question what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world that's a very good question I think nature is more beautiful than anything artificial so probably nature and then everyone chooses I like mountains for example very much Alex I thank you so much for coming onto our show thanks a lot so interesting thanks for all your great work best of luck with the lab thank you very much thank you everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below in the episode let us know what you're thinking have more conversations with your friends, families, co-workers, people online about light matter coupling about cutting edge physics about quantum computation superconductivity about all the things that we talked about regarding the second quantum revolution and about how we can best maximize prosperity moving forward check out the links in the bio below again we have the Westlake profile page for Alexei as well as the Wikipedia link and also the book link check out the book share them with your families, friends and people's online support the artists, the entrepreneurs, the people in your communities that you believe in support them, help them grow support simulation so we can continue doing cool things like coming on site to Westlake go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world we love you very much, thank you for tuning in and we will see you soon peace that's a wrap Alexei, thank you so much I know you gotta run you're so so kind thank you, I really appreciate this thank you, I love this I can't believe you're doing one on quantum computing