橡树岭国家实验室（ORNL）作为美国能源部国家量子信息科学研究中心之一，正通过其独特的设施和跨学科合作，引领着量子科学与技术的发展。ORNL利用斯帕拉通中子源（SNS）和纳米相材料科学中心（CNMS）等尖端工具，深入研究具有量子特性的材料，如自旋液体，并致力于将这些发现转化为新的量子技术。强大的高性能计算能力，包括与前沿超级计算机的结合，进一步加速了对复杂量子系统的理解和控制。这种“团队科学”的模式，强调不同领域专家之间的有效沟通与协作，对于推动基础科学发现和技术创新至关重要，同时也积极与产业界建立伙伴关系，共同探索量子技术在国家安全和经济发展中的潜力。

🔬 **前沿设施赋能量子材料研究：** ORNL拥有世界顶级的斯帕拉通中子源（SNS）和纳米相材料科学中心（CNMS），能够对具有拓扑序和纠缠等量子特性的新材料进行精确表征和合成。例如，利用SNS探测自旋液体材料中的纠缠信号，为开发新型量子技术奠定基础。

💻 **高性能计算加速科学发现：** 结合ORNL强大的高性能计算（HPC）能力，特别是与前沿超级计算机（如Frontier）的协同，能够深入理解复杂量子系统的物理性质，并加速机器学习和人工智能在材料科学领域的应用，从而加速科学发现和技术转化。

🤝 **“团队科学”促进跨学科协作：** ORNL推崇“团队科学”模式，强调不同学科背景的科学家之间高效的沟通和理解，以克服概念差异（如对“量子比特”的不同定义）。这种跨学科协作是实现量子科学突破和技术应用的关键。

🚀 **产学研合作推动技术落地：** ORNL积极与产业界建立合作伙伴关系，不仅为工业界提供先进的实验设施，也从中获取最新的量子技术洞察，并将其融入自身的科研流程。这种合作模式对于将量子科学的突破转化为实际的产品和服务至关重要，尤其是在国家安全和经济领域。

What is the mission of the Quantum Science Center?

The Quantum Science Center is one of five of the DoE’s National Quantum Information Science Research Centers.  The Quantum Science Center is a partnership led by Oak Ridge and it includes more than 20 other institutions including universities and companies.

ORNL and the other national laboratories play a crucial role in research and development within the United States. And partnerships play a crucial role in that activity. Some partnerships are with universities, especially individual investigators who require access to the powerful instruments that we develop and maintain. The labs are funded by the DOE, and users can apply to use the instruments or collaborate with our resident scientists to develop research ideas and follow through to publication.

In addition to providing cutting edge facilities to the nation’s scientists, national labs also play an important role in creating a scientific workforce that is educated in how to develop and use a range of scientific infrastructure and instrumentation. These personnel will ensure that scientific breakthroughs will continue to be made and that scientists will continue to have access to the best research facilities.

ORNL is home to several facilities for material characterization, including the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS). How is the lab using these facilities to develop new materials for quantum technologies?

ORNL has many unique facilities, including the SNS, which is a user facility of the DOE. It is one of the brightest sources of neutrons in the world, which makes it an incredibly powerful tool for characterizing novel materials.

We are using the SNS to look at some remarkable materials that have useful quantum properties such as topological order and entanglement. These strongly correlated systems have useful electronic or magnetic properties. What makes them so interesting is that under the right conditions they have unique phases in which their electrons or spins are entangled quantum mechanically.

We probe these materials using a range of instruments on the SNS and infer whether or not the materials are entangled. This allows us to identify materials that will be useful for developing new quantum technologies.

What other instruments are used to develop new quantum materials at ORNL?

The SNS is certainly one of our biggest and boldest instruments that we have for characterizing these types of systems, but in no way is it the only one. ORNL is also home to the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS). This is one of the DOE’s Office of Science Nanoscale Science Research Centers and it’s a remarkable facility co-located with the SNS at ORNL. The CNMS enables the synthesis and characterization of new quantum materials with the ultimate goal of gaining control over their useful properties.

Can you give an example of that work?

We are very interested in a type of material called a spin liquid. It’s a magnetic system where the quantum spins within the material can become entangled with each other and have correlations over very large distances – relative to the size of individual atoms. Using SNS we have detected a signature of entanglement in these materials. That material is ruthenium trichloride and it is one type of quantum magnet that we are studying at ORNL.

The next step is to take materials that have been certified as quantum or entangled and translate them into new types of devices. This is what the CNMS excels and involves fabricating a quantum material into unique geometries; and connecting it to electrodes and other types of control systems that then provide a path to demonstrating novel physics and other types of unique behaviours.

In the case of quantum spin liquids, for example, we believe that they can be translated into a new qubit (quantum bit) technology that can store and process quantum information. We haven’t got there yet, but the tools and capabilities that we have here at Oak Ridge are incredibly empowering for that type of technology development.

ORNL is also famous for its supercomputing capabilities and is home to Frontier, which is one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. How does the lab’s high-performance computing expertise support the use of its instrumentation for the development of new quantum materials?

High-performance computing (HPC) has been a remarkable and disruptive tool because it allows us to explain and understand the physics of complex systems and how these systems can be controlled and ultimately exploited to create new technologies. One of the most remarkable developments in the last several years has been the application of HPC to machine learning and artificial intelligence.

This benefits material science, chemistry, biology, and the study of other complex physical systems, where modelling and simulation play a huge role in our scientific discovery process. And supercomputers are also used in the design and optimization of products that are based on those complex physical systems. In fact, many people would say that next to theory and experiment, computation is a third pillar of the R&D ecosystem.

In my view HPC is just as powerful a research tool as the SNS or the CNMS when it comes to understanding and exploring these complex physical systems.

Why is it important to have the SNS, CNMS, Frontier and other facilities co-located at ORNL?

This integration allows our researchers to very quickly compare computer simulations to experimental data from neutron scattering and other experiments. This results in a very tight and coordinated cycle of development that ensures that we get to the best results the fastest way possible. This way of working also highlights the multidisciplinary nature of how we operate – something we call “team science”.

This requires good coordination between all parties, you have to have clarity in your communication, and you have to have a very clear vision about the goals that you’re trying to accomplish. This ensures that everyone has a common understanding of the mission of ORNL and the DOE.

How do you ensure that collaboration across different instruments and disciplines is done efficiently?

In my experience, the ability of team members to communicate efficiently, to understand each other’s concepts and reasoning, and to translate back and forth across these disciplinary boundaries is probably one of the central and most important parts of this type of scientific development. This is crucial to ensuring that people using a common infrastructure gain powerful scientific results.

For example, when we talk about qubits in quantum science and technology, people working in different subdisciplines have slightly different definitions of that word. For computer scientists, a qubit is a logical representation of information that we manipulate through quantum algorithms. In contrast, material scientists think of a qubit as a two-level quantum system that is embedded in some electronic or magnetic degree of freedom. They will often see qubits as being independent of the logical and computational connections that are necessary to create quantum computers. Bridging such differences is an important aspect of multidisciplinary research and amplifies success at our facilities.

I would say that the facilities and the ecosystem that we’ve created within the laboratory support interchange and collaboration across disciplines. The instruments enable new fundamental discoveries and the science is then developed and translated into new technologies.

That is a multi-step process and can only succeed when you have a team of  people working together on large-scale problems – and that team is always multidisciplinary.

Can you talk about your partnerships with industry

In the last decade quantum science and technology has emerged as a national priority in terms of science, industry and national security. This interest is driven by concerns for national security as well as the economic advantage – in terms of new products and services – that quantum brings. Innovation in the energy sector is an important example of how quantum has important implications for both security and the economy.

As a result, US national laboratories are partnering very closely with industry to provide access to instruments at the SNS, the CNMS and other facilities. At the same time, our researchers get access to technologies developed by industry – especially commercial quantum computing platforms.

I think that one of the most exciting things for us at ORNL today is gaining insights into these new quantum products and services and adapting this knowledge into our own scientific discovery workflows.

You can listen to the full interview with Travis Humble in our Physics World Weekly podcast

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