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Professor of Physics  has acquired international renown for his work in cold quantum gasses, non-equilibrium quantum phenomena, and exactly solvable problems. He says when it comes to potential applications, a progress in quantum information science (QIS) can revolutionize transport logistics and drug discovery; in the defense area, quantum technology is, potentially, as pivotal as nuclear technology during the second World War.

“Quantum matter is very difficult because it’s very fragile, but if you can create it and if you can sustain it, you can do useful things with it,” said Olchanyi, a professor at UMass Boston since 2007. “An at-reach application is quantum cryptography and quantum navigation, a medium-term usage is quantum-enhanced optimization, and a dream goal is a quantum computer. In particular, the latter will speed up the deciphering, so it will make the existing encryption protocols obsolete. It’s good for cracking codes.”

Olchanyi says the United States is behind other countries in the QIS area. In December, President Donald Trump signed the  into law, establishing a coordinated multiagency program spanning the National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Science Foundation (NSF), and Department of Energy to support research and training in QIS.

Last month, Olchanyi received a three-year NSF grant worth $237,700 for his project, “Ways to Mitigate Decoherence in Solitonic Schrödinger Cats.” The money will fund a postdoc and a graduate student.

In 1935, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed the following thought experiment: you place a cat and a quantum-uncertain object that will eventually kill the cat (say a radioactive atom that opens a vial with poison when it decays) in a box and seal it. Until you opened the box, the cat behaves as if it were both dead and alive, in two parallel worlds.

“Now, replace the cat with a computer. Regardless of whether the multiple worlds are real or they are just a mathematical construct, they would deliver a parallelization of the information processes that speeds up the computation,” Olchanyi said. “Deservedly, superpositions like that are often referred to as `Schrödinger Cats.’”

“In our project, we want to create a robust macroscopic quantum superposition. Quantum-coherent macroscopic states of large molecules have been generated before, but they were not long-lived. They need to live at least a second to be useful,” Olchanyi said.

“Due to some peculiar properties of cold atoms in waveguides (a presence of an unusually high number of hidden symmetries), there, the Schrödinger cats could be much more technologically accessible than anywhere else. We invented one particular waveguide-based protocol for creating a robust `Schrödinger cat’, and an experimental group at Rice University, led by Randall Hulet, is contemplating trying this idea,” he explained.

Part of the grant money will go toward increasing the public awareness of the importance of quantum technologies. For this part of the project, Olchanyi will be presenting at local museums. He hopes to get additional funding to support this particular effort.