The history of HRL

2:44:52sanding down the rivets on the airplane and then he takes it for a ride and he like lands in a cotton field and crazy things like that. Those engineers and scientists are what became Hughes research labs. Now at the time of the movie there was no HRL but I I feel like that's that's HRL. >> Okay. Was like Howard Hughes going be like me this and then and then they do it. He he got this nice little plot of land right above Pepperdime University in Malibu and he built that lab. Um, it's very famous because it actually also, um, fun fact, >> it invented the laser way back in the day. Didn't get the Nobel Prize because the Maser won the Nobel Prize for microwave amplification. The laser was the optical version of that. So, the

2:45:32Maser had already won. I think that's why the laser didn't win. Um, kind of weird because like other places, other laser things have won for a lot less. >> So, HRL has been working on encoded um, spin cubits for a while. They've had a lot of papers um, over the past decades. Um, a big one came out in 2023. It was submitted I think in 2022. Um, this one was in 2023. Universal logic with encoded spin cubits in silicon. Here they showed an instance of the first universal logic meaning universal computational logic like you can do anything you want with two cubits. But remember two cubits with exchange only means six electrons.

2:46:13>> Electrons. So there were six electrons. Yeah. Right. Okay. And we've got a little video that shows exactly how that works. So here you've got your six cubits, the six sort of potential wells, and the blue are the exchange gates, the barriers in between. >> Okay, >> this is the wiring. And here you can see sort of the wiring problem already, right? >> Um even with those six cubits, there's all these wires that need to go in to control the voltages in that little environment, >> right? Yeah, >> these are the gates >> that go through the silicon heterosructure as you can see. >> And right in that layer there is where the electrons are confined. >> Okay, >> three at a time for a single cubit. It's

2:46:54called a DFS cubit here because it's decoherence free subspace. That's that's the whole idea of I don't care about magnetic fields. So I'm free from decoherence due to magnetic fields. >> Um and now you can see the voltage pulses come in. They mix the electrons together and that is everything that is needed >> for all logical operations. >> And then what we're seeing with the squiggles is it kind of similar to the resonance lines we saw in I guess it would have been the superconducting cubits. >> Oh, this the these squiggles over here. No, that's a representation of um which which two electrons are getting mixed at a time. >> Okay. So, it's basically giving us our zero or one.

2:47:34>> Yeah. Yeah. It's giving us our Yeah. like the zero and one is um the the three the three here being in either a singlet or a triplet, the three here being either singlet or a triplet plus whatever. Um and the squiggles are telling you like if the if there's six independent lines that tells you that you're you're doing nothing. If two of the lines come together that's telling you that you're removing the barrier in between those two lines. And so this is a quantum sort of like a simple gate operation that you're performing. That's it's a two cubit gate operation that you're I don't I don't actually know what exactly the gate is that is being represented in this video. Again, if there are um former colleagues in the

2:48:15comments, let me know what exactly this gate is. But in any case, that's the idea right? >> The golden gate now playing. [laughter] >> Yeah. So the the the golden electrodes are what maintain the the valleys. Yep. >> Right. And then and then the little blue pulses come in to make the the electrons mix together. And whenever a blue pulse comes in, those two lines sort of come together. >> Again, come together. Basically, our hotel rooms are where the pink is. The door in between the hotel rooms in our analogy from earlier is when they start coming together. That's when the doors open and that's being triggered by the pulses that were coming exactly having down the gold. And then we were reading out again the state based on whether they're >> and then these two on the left that's

2:48:55the that's the single electron transistor on the left here. Those are that's that's the thing that is sensing right. >> Okay. That's the M1 is the Z M1 Z2. Those are the single electron transistors. Got it. Got it. Okay. >> Um >> that are sensor because they can sense what's the elevator shaft. >> Exactly. And then they can sense like when we finally want to read it out we'll shove the the two into one. If they if they get shoved together, then you've got a um single it. If they don't get shoved together, then you've got a triplet. And you can you can figure that out. >> Makes sense. >> Okay. So, this is this is the quantum computer, >> right? Okay. It's made in silicon. >> Okay. Yes. >> Right. It's printed in silicon. >> The gate electrodes are all like printed the same way that you sort of print a chip. >> Yep. And it works. >> And it works, right? For two cubic

2:49:36gates, it totally works. This was in 2022. >> And this is right around the time that I started my job. >> Yep. >> At HRL. Um, I got involved about a year in into my career at HRL. I was having a great time. Um, more on what I did specifically later. And then came early 2026. Um, when HRL lost significant program funding. I know I can say this because um, Thaddius Lad, who's one of the um, corresponding authors on this on this paper, he went on um a podcast with Sebastian Hassinger called the New Quantum Era podcast. If you want to hear it from uh one of the corresponding authors on this paper, go check out that podcast. It's not that long. This is going to be a three-hour long podcast,

2:50:17but uh you know, that one's only 40 minutes. Um and it was announced to the world in February. There's a bunch of headlines from the great journalistic powerhouses of the Malibu Times and the Los Angeles Daily News talking about how um HRL had to lay off 376 employees. Um, Malibu's HRL labs cuts that many jobs after losing government work. So, HRL was kind of in a crisis mode and they transitioned from um, you know, working on this stuff to now we need to commercialize this. We need to have we need to bring in some outside work to commercialize this. Maybe someone's going to buy us and that's when IBM

2:50:57comes in later. >> I I want to make a quick note here about when we talk about funding conversations. is there's a difference between basic research and applied research or applied technologies and this is kind of that line that is being straddled here because >> and correct me if I'm wrong here to some extent in its initial conception >> it was still it was going to eventually be applied somehow but the context was let's just do this as a basic research function and figure out how to get to stability here um however the government is cutting basic re more re generally yeah is cutting basic research in uh favor for applied research. Which basically means where can we go invest our money and make billions of dollars?

2:51:39>> Yeah. >> Uh how can we productize stuff? How can we create this golden age of American technology? That is kind of the thetick right now. Yeah. And as such right um IBM in the chips act was given a prop around this idea of we need to create reonshore chip manufacturing and >> yeah Intel too I think >> and Intel and and IBM are two great American chip makers right and how do we compete and blah so I'm just this is the background context in which this is happening where there's a huge >> federal policy funding shift to putting

2:52:19money where it is perceived that it can boost stock prices basically. >> Yeah. I mean I don't know much about that but that that's the that's the that's the context. >> That's the context. Yeah. >> Um and it's it's not it's very explicit in the documentation coming out of the executive office of the president in terms of how they've defined you have the this uh project with the department of energy where they're doing the same idea. They're the idea is we want to decompress the time from research to application. That's how it's framed, >> right? Um and application means monetization ultimately. Um and how do we make this something that actually can

2:53:01generate GDP value because they want to mimic what's been done with AI >> ah in terms of boosting growth GDP growth in the US in every other industry much more quickly. >> Yeah. >> So that's the context. Uh again a separate issue and a separate topic >> and my viewpoint on this not that of Krishna for those who are listening >> who are still listening who are his teammates. Um and again it's weird people get weirdly emotional about this subject in ways that it doesn't make sense to me because it's just it's literally what they're saying. >> Yeah. [laughter] I mean the White House is very explicit in its executive orders and its website white house.gov. You can check it out. Right. So in any case um

2:53:42HRL loses significant program funding and so um this is when HRL decides to sort of come out with this work. Um and during that reduction force I had to move on to other places. So APS March meeting is also coming up right after this this event. And so at APS March meeting, we're all giving our talks and there was we had already sort of applied to give the talks, but now there's this kind of urgency to give these talks, right? Um and we're we're I we're not presenting the stuff that's in this paper. We're we all have like our own talks. And I had I had the last talk before the big talk of that lad um who's

2:54:23one of the corresponding authors on this paper, right? And um we were presenting stuff that's adjacent to it. But I got um but there's rumors at March meeting that Thaddius's talk is going to be this big talk. Okay, it's going to he's going to present some like really cool results. Um I had the last HRL talk before Thaddius's and in my last slide I snuck in a photo of some of the stuff that's shown shown here and it was really funny actually um just to give you guys kind of an insider of like you know how conferences work and things like that. Um this was a this was a talk in the automation section. Um and spin cubits is quite a big field. So there it was quite a crowded um event. Uh people

2:55:03came and in the last slide I I showed like a little sneak peek of this stuff and I dropped it like it was like you know in a Nickelodeon shows that they'd have those celebrity cameos and like they'd stop and then the audience would like go crazy. It was like when that happened like everybody took out their phones and started taking photographs um in the audience cuz this was all new stuff. And I said, you know, more on this, go to Thaddius's talk. It's going to be a banger. And a lot of people showed up to this was a in a big conference room, one of these like big spin cubit um exposees where you had um HRL giving a talk, Intel giving a talk, um Drock, which is where I'm currently at, giving a talk. And that goes up on

2:55:47stage and he drops this image. This is one of his first slides that he drops. This is