In Episode 15, Patrick and Ciprian speak with Dr. Andrew King of D-Wave Systems and Dr. Cristiano Nisoli of Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

This engaging conversation covers topics including artificial spin ice, nanomagnets, programmatic manipulation of quasiparticles, the new D-Wave Advantage Processor, and how Quantum developments can clarify our perception of fundamental physics.

Dr. Andrew King is Director of Performance Research at D-Wave, the practical quantum computing company. His work on quantum annealing ranges from studying hybrid performance and applications of D-Wave processors to quantum simulation of magnetic spin systems. His recent research has demonstrated a computational scaling advantage over classical Monte Carlo methods in the quantum simulation of geometrically frustrated lattice, offering the clearest look yet at relaxation dynamics of an open quantum system on over a thousand Ising spins. Andrew received his Ph.D in Computer Science at McGill University and has been with D-Wave since 2013.

 Cristiano Nisoli is a theoretical physicist in the T-division at LANL, where he has been since 2008. He works on frustrated, artificial magnetic systems, so called artificial spin ices, of which his group has proposed various geometries which are then realized at the magnetic nanoscale or with trapped colloids or with skyrmions in liquid crystals. The idea behind the program is to generate new exotic emergent behaviors from the collective dynamics of binary variables, such as magnetic moments of nanoislands, or in this case qubits.