Krishna’s Nature cover paper
Krishna Choudhary is a co-author on a paper called 'A Digitally Controlled Silicon Quantum Processing Unit,' published in Nature and featured on its cover. The paper comes from HRL Labs, Krishna's former workplace, and lists roughly 250 authors under the collective name 'members of the HRL quantum team and collaborators.' The large author count reflects the scale of resources and coordination required to build a quantum computer, a pattern Krishna compares to other big-science collaborations in physics.
- Krishna's background before quantum computing was at the intersection of neuroscience and physics during his PhD at UCLA, making the Nature quantum computing cover a surprise even to him.
- Other big-science examples the hosts name: the Brookhaven STAR collaboration on quark physics and the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which images the black hole in M87 and carries roughly 300 authors on its papers.
- A previous FFP guest, Dr. Michael Blandon of Carnegie, described living through the historical shift from individually credited papers to large collaborative 'big science' publications.
Transcript
This chapter, from the episode video's captions · 460 words
1:45Those of you who keep up with us on Instagram and watch our stories there will know that I am co-author on a paper that was recently published in nature. And not only was it published, it was featured on the cover. And I have to say when I was a PhD student at UCLA and I was in the intersection of neuroscience and physics, I definitely dream about this day, right? Um, every PhD student dreams about the day that maybe one of their papers is going to be featured on the cover of nature, science, cell, things like that. Um, I wouldn't have guessed that it would have been a quantum computing story though and I think if if you ask uh PhD Krishna
2:27about it, he'd be like, wait, what happened to the original plot of the movie? You know, and also why are you in a podcast studio? Anyways, so here's the paper itself. It's called a digitally controlled silicon quantum processing unit. There are a lot of authors. The official author that's like under the tagline there is members of the HRL quantum team and collaborators. HRL labs is my former workplace and something like 250 authors are on this thing. And right there on the list in the blue, that's that's me highlighted. It's in alphabetical order. Um, so you know, Chowdery CH comes up
3:09maybe 20% down. If if they actually did it in order of importance, I think I'd be somewhere in the bottom uh bottom line there. >> Nobody has to know, >> you know. Yeah. Hey, it still counts. It still counts. And um there's a good reason why there are so many authors because I think what we accomplished required a lot of manpower and a lot of resources. We've covered stories before that have a lot of big groups. So, this isn't like totally out of the ordinary for physics papers. For example, we've covered um the Brook Havens star collaboration when they were doing like um some weird quirk
3:49physics or the event horizon telescope. That thing has 300 authors in all of its papers. That's the, you know, collaboration that images the black hole of M87. >> Even when you did the interview with Dr. Michael Blandon at Carnegie. He had mentioned this transition from individual name papers to sort of this idea of big science. Exactly. And he kind of lived through that transition. >> Yes. Exactly. And and you know to build a quantum computer it requires big science. >> Right. Now I was planning to cover that paper and then as I was cramming everything and doing all of my background research I started realizing that you know in order to talk about
From How Quantum Computing Actually Works (Part 1)
Part I of our quantum computing deep dive traces the field from Bell and Feynman to Deutsch and Shor—and explains what quantum computers actually do differently from classical machines.