Andrew Houck

Vibrations are a challenge for a lot of these systems.

You need very carefully vibration-isolated systems.

You need to make sure the temperature is absolutely controlled.

And then we also care very much about materials purity.

What are all of the atoms that shouldn't be there that are around your material?

All of those things come and hurt you.

And every time you make...

your qubit 10 times better, that means you are more sensitive to all of those things that didn't matter before.

And so every time you make it better, every little thing that didn't used to matter now starts to matter.

So you just increase the number of problems you have to worry about.

The reason this field is exciting is that you get to play with the mysterious world of quantum physics and the great wondrous way the universe works and also build something that can be applied.

And maybe we'll do something that actually helps humanity.

Princeton's motto is Princeton in the service of humanity.

And we really care about doing things that matter.

The scientific nerdy part of me just wants to see the physics work.

And of course, working to build a new drug or to make a new catalyst that can help with energy and the environment, something that actually helps mankind would be wonderful.

One thing that I think is really important about the whole field is how the different pieces work together.

We have quantum computing companies, we have national labs, we have academics, and they all work on different parts of this problem in ways that spur productivity forward.

Industry has these incredibly large scaled systems that I can never build in an academic lab with the size of investment that we make there.

We in academia make these breakthroughs that make it so much easier for these systems to scale.