What's New
Thursday, July 10, 2008: ARO-MURI
Talks and Guidances are on-lineThe on-line guidances are:
The on-line talks (latest versions) are:
The documents are guidances to a GEN-4 Engineering Research Center (ERC) that is now being organized.
Gen-4 science and engineering initiatives are now in the early planning stages. These initiatives will be the successors to the NSF's highly successful Gen-3 initiatives.
We foresee that quantum system engineering (QSE) will play a key role in many Gen-4 initiatives.
Building on the computational toolset of our ARO-MURI Group's Practical recipes for quantum simulation, the UW QSE Group has contributed the following Gen-4-enabling objective to the Computing Community Consortium's public initiative Visions for Theoretical Computer Science:
Computing in Large-Dimension State-SpacesMore and more modern computational tasks have the property that the size of the state space is a matter of discretion and design. For example, in simulating quantum systems researchers can choose to work in the native Hilbert state-space (thus preserving invariances), or alternatively in reduced-order spaces (thus bringing geometry to bear), or alternatively in the larger-than-Hilbert dictionary spaces of compressive sensing and sampling theory (thus bringing information theory to bear).
These new design choices are ubiquitous in both classical and quantum state-spaces. Increasingly, they are relevant to large-scale calculations in every branch of science and engineering.
A program that specifically focusses on the question "What general computational principles and techniques are broadly applicable to systems having large-dimension state-spaces?", as defined in a series of conferences, white papers, test-beds, and rapid-prototyping software, will cross-fertilize and invigorate many disciplines.
Industrial Participation Will Be Encouraged
Science and engineering work best---generate the most new ideas, new enterprises, jobs, and prosperity---when there is a vigorous two-way flow of ideas, from the abstract to the concrete and from the concrete to the abstract. Large-scale state-spaces are an emerging arena within which this two-way flow of ideas is outstandingly vigorous.
The United States' science and technology community is uniquely well-positioned to take advantage of these new opportunities, by virtue of its culture of enterprise and innovation. Mathematics and computation are the two keys that open this new door.
Thursday, May 15: The Mission, Status, and Outlook
of the Institute for Soldier Healing (ISH)Building on our ARO-MURI Group's Practical recipes, and focussing upon specific applications, our presentation The Mission, Status, and Outlook of the Institute for Soldier Healing (ISH) is now on-line.
The ISH is the third element of our QSE Group's fundamental R&D triad:
This triad will be the focus of a planned GEN-4 Engineering Research Center (ERC) that is now being organized.
Wednesday: May 14The arXiv server now has our ARO-MURI Group's Practical Recipes online as 0805.1844.
A discussion of the Practical Recipes material on compressive sampling (CS) has been added to our on-line talk How does the Stern-Gerlach Effect really work?
The added material reflects our emerging appreciation that compressive sampling (CS) and quantum model order reduction (QMOR) are concerned with the same fundamental mathematical topic: compressible objects.
In the slide above, Goldilocks and the Three Bears provides an allegorical context for three state-spaces that are useful in quantum simulation: the "baby" state-space of Kählerian algebraic varieties, the "mama" Hilbert space of linear quantum mechanics, and the "papa" state-space that is defined by associating a Hamming metric to the sampling dictionaries of compressive sampling (CS) theory.
More formally, the mutual embrace of compressive sampling (CS) theory and quantum model order reduction (QMOR) theory provides new insights to both disciplines. One example: coding theory proves to be helpful in constructing RIP matrices that are useful for applying convex optimization algorithms to practical problems in large-scale quantum simulation.
The practical consequence of the above QSE-CS convergence is that the scale and scope of next-generation technology development are being expanded, and the pace of that development is being accelerated.
It is an exciting time to be a quantum system engineer.
An expanded version of Practical
Recipes is on-lineOur UW QSE Group's Practical Recipes compendium now has a new nine-page final section: Section 4.6: Quantum state reconstruction from sparse random projections. The material in this section establishes a number of nontrivial connections between quantum simulation and the emerging discipline of compressive sensing.
In particular, topics like the following are extended to quantum state-spaces:
These connections are so natural—and so useful—that we have (provisionally) retitled the manuscript Practical recipes for the model order reduction, dynamical simulation, and optimization by Dantzig selection of large-scale open quantum systems.
It remains only to draft a new Conclusions section … which requires that we consider in some detail what these connections mean. This is no easy task, and feedback from colleagues is especially welcome.
Meanwhile, here are some quantum states that have been reconstructed from sparse random projections (Fig. 13 of the manuscript). Yes, compressive sampling theory really works in the quantum domain!
The 2008 Gordon Conference talks are
availableThe 2008 Gordon Conference Mechanical Systems in the Quantum Regime has concluded ... it was a great conference!
Our ARO/MURI Team's talk How does the Stern-Gerlach Effect really work? is now on-line:
Comments are welcome.
The 2007 Spinometer Seminar is
RunningThe 2007 Spinometer Seminar is up-and-running, and we have upgraded it from a seminar to a noncredit course on model reduction (MOR) methods in quantum system engineering (QSE). The curriculum and recommended reading for this course are here.
Lectures are given on the first and third Wednesday of each month, at 3:00 pm, in room 119 of the Mechanical Engineering Building. All are welcome.
A New Year's 2007 Essay: What is
Quantum System Engineering?Our QSE Group's short essay entitled What is Quantum System Engineering? is on-line here.
The essay has now been updated to version 1.0, and we sincerely thank all our colleagues who reviewed earlier drafts.
This essay was written originally as the introduction to a review article on large-scale quantum simulation, and it equally serves to provide a paragraph-by-paragraph tribute and acknowledgment of the influence of Prof. Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment Contested on our engineering research (as discussed in an appendix to the essay).
Faculty Position in Quantum System
EngineeringTo apply for the UW ME Department's tenure-track faculty position(s) in quantum system engineering, please see this advertisement.
The ME Department encourages any and all qualified applicants, from both theoretical and experimental backgrounds, who seek to create and teach new technologies that push against the bounds that quantum mechanics imposes on the speed, accuracy, sensitivity, size, and power consumption of modern mechatronic devices.
This position provides a wonderful opportunity to participate in creating and teaching the new, exciting, strategically important, and rapidly growing engineering discipline of quantum system engineering (QSE).
Quantum System Engineering (QSE)Following the KIAS-KAIST 2006 Workshop on Quantum Information Science (held August 28-30) we spoke at the JEOL Corporation in Japan (on August 31).
We thank both KIAS-KAIST and the JEOL Corporation for their kind hospitality!
The slides from the JEOL talk are available here:
These JEOL slides are a superset of the KIAS-KAIST talk given earlier in the week (links below); the JEOL talk has extra slides dealing with "quantum shinkansen". These extra slides grew out of many wonderful conversations in Korea. Here is the title slide from the JEOL talk, as influenced by the KIAS-KAIST Workshop:
KIAS-KAIST 2006 Workshop on Quantum Information ScienceOur UW QSE Group's presentation is on-line:
Note: a longer version of the KIAS-KAIST talk was given at JEOL (JEOL slides here);Here is the abstract to the KIAS-KAIST Workshop talk.
From Quantum Physics to Quantum System Engineering:
Simulating Single-Spin and Multiple-Spin Imaging
in Magnetic Resonance Force Microscopy
John A. Sidles, Ph.D.
Quantum System Engineering Group
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, USA
URL: http://www.mrfm.orgThis talk will describe a new technique for model order reduction in large-scale quantum spin simulations. The technique has three stages: first the deliberate introduction of noise into the simulation, then the conversion of that noise into an informatically equivalent continuous measurement process, and finally, the projection of the resulting quantum trajectory onto state-space manifolds of low dimensionality, specifically, finite-rank product-sum manifolds of Beylkin-Mohlenkamp type. These manifolds are shown to have a Kahler-type complex geometry.
The practical application of this technique is illustrated by numerical simulations of single-spin detection by magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM): excellent agreement with experimental results is obtained. In the Markovian noise limit, the statistics of single-spin detection are predicted to all orders, and are found to be those of a random telegraph signal with added white noise.
These methods are then applied to larger-scale quantum simulations, in the context of a deliberately challenging spin-dust model that has no spatial symmetry and no spatial ordering; the high-fidelity projection of numerically computed quantum trajectories onto low-dimensionality Kahler state-space manifolds is demonstrated. The informatic invariance associated with Choi's Theorem, and the scalar Ricci curvature and Ricci flow of the Kahler manifold state-space, are both shown to play important roles in achieving high-fidelity projection. It is concluded that model order reduction by projection onto a Kahler manifold state-space allows a large class of quantum systems to be simulated with polynomial space and time resources.
The talk will conclude by discussing the implications of these new techniques for product development, and more broadly, for the emerging profession of quantum system engineering.
EMSL Worshop at Richland, WAOur UW QSE Group's presentation is on-line: (schedule here)
Our UW QSE Group's presentations are on-line:
The QSE Daily Journal is now on-line.
The web page UW Quantum System Engineering Seminar Write-up summarizes the findings of a two-year UW Quantum System Engineering (QSE) Seminar, informally known as the Spinometers Seminar.
Until recently the Spinometers Seminar site was password-protected, and was open only to participants in the seminar. As of May 1, 2006 we are opening access to the general public.
The educational component of our VINCI/Vanguard Program has now been defined in a three-page white paper that we are circulating for public comment (click here for PDF).
Note: this white paper was initially written for UW local review, as the first draft of a pre-proposal to the W. M. Keck Foundation's Science and Engineering Program. Because this document is an initial draft, it is intended solely for local review, public comments, and teambuilding.
The FREE Program's Roadmap The UW FREE Program—Federative Resources for Engineering Enterprises—is our UW QSE Group's working roadmap for helping to strengthen engineering and science education at the UW. As the white paper states:
We envision that the UW FREE Program will help pioneer a new frontier for American engineering: a frontier that is energized by immersive teaching, vitalized by new technological resources, and funded by strategic service.
The FREE Program's Objectives The objective of the FREE Program will be to teach engineering and science skills by immersive apprenticeship in hardware development and advanced theoretical research, in an environment that embraces teaching, research, and service as a single federative enterprise.
The FREE Program's Projects The FREE Program will tackle grand challenges in engineering and science. Its initial focus will be quantum microscopy: a technology for directly observing the entire biomolecular universe with atomic-scale resolution.
The FREE Program's Federative Focus In engineering, the word federation generally refers to a combination of knowledge and techniques from multiple disciplines. In modeling and simulation, federation has acquired a more specific meaning: an assembly of dissimilar components whose interactions are considered in a systematic, explicitly quantitative way. By focussing on federative skills and technology, the FREE Program will prepare its students for leadership roles in 21st Century engineering and science.
VINCI/Vanguard 2006 LinksOverview of VINCI/Vanguard 2006 VINCI is our QSE Group's open-source, federated quantum system engineering environment, and Vanguard 2006 is this year's primary VINCI objective: end-to-end quantum modeling of the anti-HIV drug nevirapine.
VINCI/Vanguard 2006 federates three key advances: GNU Radio, P-time quantum simulation algorithms, and downselection of nevirapine as an imaging target (see below).
VINCI/Vanguard will be the Year 2006 focus of our ARO/MURI Program for Achieving Single Nuclear Spin Detection. Our full ARO/MURI research plan is here (in PDF).
GNU Radio On-Line Our QSE
Group's lead software engineer Jon Jacky now has his GNU Radio installation instructions on-line. This is a
major step forward in our VINCI Program for open-engineering
hardware-in-the-loop (HWIL) quantum system development.
As background, GNU Radio is an NSF- and DoD-sponsored open-source hardware and software environment, originally designed for radio-frequency signal processing, that our QSE Group has extended to encompass quantum system modeling, simulation, and control.
Nevirapine Case Study
On-Line Our QSE Group's premed student Chris
Kikuchi now has a preprint online Assessing the Capabilities of Quantum Microscopy for
Drug Development: Nevirapine as a Case Study and Design
Target.
The nevirapine case study will play a central design role when we unite it with our GNU Radio hardware-in-the-loop capability and our new P-time quantum simulation algorithms. More precisely, in the modern terminology of modeling and simulation, we will "federate" these technologies.
Quantum Microscopy's "Sputnik Moment" To describe our quantum microscopy project in terms of its parallels with the Space Program, the quantum microscopy community has already achieved the equivalent of Sputnik: this was the IBM MRFM Group's historic single-spin MRFM experiment, led by Dan Rugar.
Preparing for an "Apollo Moment" Quantum microscopy's next major engineering milestone is to calculate the equivalent of an Apollo lunar mission trajectory, that is, to calculate realistic end-to-end simulations of quantum imaging missions that are medically, strategically, scientifically, and commercially important.
The Central Role of Trajectory Calculations For engineering purposes, it is essential that reliable trajectory calculations be performed as early as possible in a project. For example, early lunar trajectory calculations largely determined the design of the Saturn V rocket and all its payloads. For identical engineering reasons, the calculation of end-to-end quantum imaging trajectories is driving the design of our next-generation nanotechnology (i.e., the cantilevers, sensors, and magnetic tips).
IBM's Pivotal Role Apollo's lunar trajectories were calculated at NASA's famous IBM real-time computer complexes (RTCCs) as described in this IBM Journal of Research and Development article. In NASA's own history we read:
The story of computers in manned mission control is largely the story of a close and mutually beneficial partnership between NASA and IBM. [...] When Project Vanguard, and later NASA, approached IBM with the requirements for computers to do telemetry monitoring, trajectory calculations, and commanding, IBM found a market for its largest computers and a vehicle for developing ways of creating software to control multiple programs executing at once, capable of accepting and handling asynchronous data, and of running reliably in real time. These things the company was able to do quite successfully, and the groups it assigned to the job impressed their NASA counterparts. When asked about IBM's performance in this field, one NASA manager said without hesitation: "IBM is the best".
The early Vanguard orbital calculations were done on an IBM 709. The IBM 709 seems primitive today (it used vacuum tubes!) but it provided the starting point for IBM's subsequent, enormously successful, product line of commercial computers. Even more famously, these IBM computers and their calculations provided the foundations for President Kennedy's famous "We will go to the moon" speech (text and audio here).
Vanguard 2006 Our program's next quantum imaging target will be the anti-HIV drug nevirapine, as described in the above Kikuchi preprint; we will integrate the dynamical equations supplied by our new P-time quantum simulation algorithms; and these equations will be embodied in Dr. Jacky's hardware-in-the-loop (HWIL) simulation environment. The resulting quantum system engineering environment will allow our QSE Group to proceed with rapid, concurrent development of multiple quantum microscopy subsystems.
We call this year-long project "Vanguard 2006", since it plays a similar role in our overall quantum microscopy program to Vanguard's role in the Apollo Program
The VINCI Toolset We call our federated quantum system engineering environment "VINCI". VINCI was originally an acronym for "Virtual Instrument Control Interface", but nowadays we use it to refer to our entire integrated toolset.
VINCI's new P-time quantum trajectory algorithms are essential to the design of the nanotechnological elements of quantum microscopy (i.e., the cantilevers, sensors, and magnetic tips), and to "flight control" of the ensuing quantum imaging missions. As with the IBM/NASA RTCCs, VINCI's mission is to ensure that "What we build works".
VINCI Flight Control The similarity between flying a satellite and running a quantum microscopy experiment is so strong that our QSE Group designates a "flight controller" for each experiment.
Our present flight controller is Joe Malcomb (at left). As with Gene Kranz and other NASA flight controllers, for whom, famously, "failure was not an option", quantum microscopy flight control is a job for young people who have an outstanding aptitude for real-time problem-solving and system analysis.
No human lives are immediately at risk when Joe guides our micron-scale quantum spacecraft a few nanometers above a cryogenic specimen, under real-time control, watching dozens of channels information simultaneously. In fact, these experiments are a lot of fun for the whole group!
But simultaneously, we are aware that quantum microscopy was envisioned in 1992 as a tool for creating better treatments for HIV/AIDS, and we also realize that today, fourteen years later, the HIV/AIDS pandemic still rages around the world, with no vaccine and no cure (yet).
So in a larger sense—like all engineers and scientists—we too are conscious that "failure is not an option," if our diligence can prevent that failure.
For this reason—and many others—our QSE Group takes each mission seriously: we try not to disappoint our flight director, who tries not to disappoint us, and we all appreciate that each mission brings our team—and all humanity—closer to transformational new scientific and medical capabilities, and also, fulfillment of a long-held dream of Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, and Linus Pauling.
VINCI's Challenges VINCI's quantum trajectories are considerably harder to calculate than the classical spacecraft trajectories that guided the Apollo Program. For this reason, the new and highly efficient algorithms that our VINCI initiative has developed for calculating quantum imaging trajectories are likely to find spin-off applications in many other areas of quantum science and engineering.
Even with these new algorithms, the quantum computational challenges of VINCI are sufficiently great that they can only be met by state-of-the-art computer hardware and software. In the 20th Century the required technologies were not available, thus VINCI is a 21st Century toolset.
VINCI's Scope Like IBM/NASA's real-time computer complexes, VINCI encompasses the federated missions of design, modeling, simulation, control, diagnostics, and data analysis.
A major strategic consideration is that the new frontier that VINCI is exploring—quantum biospace—is as large and rich as outer space, and yet the individual vehicles for exploring this frontier—quantum microscopes—will be far smaller and more affordable than Saturn V boosters: they will be tabletop-scale, in fact.
Given the inherent small scale of quantum microscope technology, we foresee an era in which many tens of thousands of quantum microscopes are in simultaneous operation, each transmitting a continuous stream of structural observations from the nearly infinite informatic richness of biospace. Also, there will be numerous applications of quantum microscopy in materials science and microelectronics.
Our UW QSE Group therefore anticipates that VINCI's federated tools for quantum system engineering will be widely disseminated, and VINCI has embraced an open-source development model for this reason.
VINCI's Future To meet the challenges of space flight, the IBM/NASA RTCCs developed and grew through successive Vanguard, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Our VINCI development effort is presently focussing on its "Vanguard 2006" objective of nevirapine simulation, but it is already clear that VINCI-type tools will continue to develop and grow, in order that we may achieve one of the 21st Century's most exciting and strategically vital Grand Challenges: the exploration of quantum biospace.
Achieving Quantum Molecular Microscopy in
Five YearsDuring December 19-21, we were pleased to preview for the Army/ARL, NSF, NIH, and the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, what will be our UW QSE Group's main focus for 2006: Achieving Quantum Molecular Microscopy in Five Years: Following in the Footsteps of Apollo.
The presentation can be downloaded from this directory in both PowerPoint and PDF versions. An animation file for the end-to-end quantum simulation of the IBM single-spin experiment is included. These files are large; the PDF file is sixty slides totalling 70 MBytes.
During the coming weeks we will be dividing this presentation into single-slide HTML pages, with commentary for each slide. Here is the presentation's concluding slide:
Our QSE Group's talk Emerging Techniques for Solving NP-Complete Problems in Mathematics, Biology, Engineering, and Physics is now available from the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications as a streaming video (click here).
Note: on OS X, the video seems to work best when opened with the RealOne Player. Note also that the first thirty seconds of the talk were not captured (so the initial gap is not a bug in the player). Fortunately, the meaning of the first slide becomes clear from context. The PDF and PowerPoint slides for the talk are available here.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
Emerging Techniques for Solving NP-Complete Problems
in Mathematics, Biology, Engineering ... and Physics
John A. Sidles, Ph.D.
Professor, UW School of Medicine
Adjunct Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Adjunct Professor, Bioengineering
Complex systems are ubiquitous in mathematics, biology, engineering, and
physics, and the past ten years have witnessed an exponential increase in
the literature associated such systems. A shared conceptual framework is
becoming apparent among challenges as seemingly different as the following:
the search by mathematicians for exact high-order trigonometric identities,
the search by engineers for stable control systems, the search by
biologists for stable protein structures, and the search by condensed
matter physicists for ground states.
Recent work has shown that separated product-sum representations provide a
powerful and broadly applicable tool for analyzing complex systems. Beylkin
and Mohlenkamp provide a good introduction to these representations in their
recent preprint "Algorithms for Numerical Analysis in High Dimensions" (*).
This talk will review some of the basic ideas of separated product-sum
representations, and discuss how our UW Quantum System Engineering (QSE)
Group is applying these ideas in polynomial-time simulations of large-scale
quantum spin systems.
Our QSE Group has found that Beylkin and Mohlenkamp's methods can be
readily extended to dynamical systems by a two-fold trick: (1) introduce
noise, and (2) convert the noise to an equivalent measurement processes.
The second step exploits the same unitary invariance of operator-sum
representations that plays a central role in quantum computing theory. The
resulting quantum trajectories are readily projected onto low-dimensional
manifolds of Beylkin-Mohlenkamp type, where they can be integrated using
polynomial-time numerical algorithms.
The practical consequence is that a broad class of problems in quantum
physics and engineering that were previously thought to be in the
(intractable) complexity class EXP can now be solved by algorithms that are
in the (much simpler) complexity class NP. The lecture will close with an
informal survey of physics problems that might be addressed by these methods.
(*) http://amath.colorado.edu/activities/preprints/archive/519.pdf
Professor Joe Garbini named to Morrison Endowed
Chair of Mechanical Engineering
On
October 21, UW Mechanical Engineering Professor Joe Garbini, who is lead engineer of our Quantum
System Engineering Group, was named to the newly-endowed Morrison Chair in Mechanical Engineering.
This chair is the generous gift of Henry Schatz, who is CEO of General Plastics Manufacturing Company. Mr. Schatz was a student of Mechanical Engineering Professor Jim Morrison, for whom the chair is named.
Joe was awarded the Morrison Chair on the strength of his outstanding record of teaching, service, and research, and also for his equally outstanding personal traits of kindness, humanity, and creativity, which are greatly cherished by us, Joe's colleagues and students. He is everything an engineer should be. Our heartiest and most sincere congratulations go to Joe!
Quantum Microscopy under ARO/MURI: Making "Radar
for Molecules" HappenThis past November 13 saw the kickoff meeting in Seattle of our new ARO/MURI Program for Achieving Single Nuclear Spin Detection.
Informally, we call our ARO/MURI program "Radar for Molecules", because as scientists and engineers, we have reasonable technical grounds to foresee that quantum microscope technology (FAQ here) will exert a global strategic and economic impact similar to radar during 1930–1960, and to semiconductor technology during 1950–2000.
Our ARO/MURI white paper outlines what "radar for molecules" would mean strategically (p. 22):Our NIH white paper outlines what "radar for molecules" would mean for science and medicine (p. 4):Just as radar was envisioned as an urgently-needed means for military and civil defense against aircraft threats, quantum microscopy can be envisioned as an urgently-needed means for military and civil defense against chemical and biological terrorist threats. Also like radar—but to an even greater extent—quantum microscope technology promises to provide new foundations for the national and global economic prosperity upon which modern military strategy relies.
Our expectation is that the next generation of molecular biologists will routinely, quickly, and easily obtain images showing the full three-dimensional structure of the molecules they are studying, in situ, with all their ligands, cross-links, and glycosylation in place. Our hope is that this will substantially accelerate the development of effective treatments for presently intractable disorders.
Thanks largely to experimental breakthroughs at IBM in 2004, and also to the advent in 2005 of new, highly-efficient design tools for quantum system engineering, we have become reasonably confident that our ARO/MURI "Radar for Molecules" program can go all the way to deployment in the next five years.
The rest of this web page describes what is needed to make that happen, emphasizing particularly recent developments that are not covered in the above white papers.
Acknowledgments
We thank Freeman Dyson for crucial encouragement (click here) in the early days of quantum microscopy.
We thank historians Alan Beyerchen, Williamson Murray, and Allan Millet, whose writings (click here) taught our QSE Group the vital role of simple, open explanations.
We thank MIT historian Lily Kay (recently deceased) for the material she provided (click here) relating to work in the 1940s and 1950s of Linus Pauling, John von Neumann, and Richard Feynman in atomic-resolution microscopy.
We thank physicists Michael Neilsen, Isaac Chuang, and Carlton Caves, and also mathematicians Gregory Beylkin and Martin Mohlenkamp, for providing our QSE Group—at precisely the right time—with the new physical ideas (click here) and new mathematical tools (click here) we needed to design quantum devices that work.
We particularly thank IBM's MRFM Group, led by Dan Rugar, for their 2004 breakthrough (click here): the first single-spin detection by magnetic resonance force microscopy. Our QSE Group regards the IBM single-spin experiment as being as significant as Fermi's 1942 demonstration of a nuclear chain reaction.
Finally, we acknowledge IBM CEO Sam Palmisano for valuable insights (click here) on the globalization of science, engineering, and strategic technology development.This material is based on a presentation we gave at UW Condensed Matter Physics Seminar on October 11 (we extend our thanks to the seminar's organizer, David Cobden) and on November 8 at the Frontiers in Imaging Workshop, sponsored by the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications (IMA). The full presentation (all slides) is available on-line (click here).
Contents and Commentary
We will updating these comments every day between now and November 13, 2005, which is the date of our ARO/MURI Program's kick-off meeting.
We greatly welcome your comments, and we will do our best to respond to them constructively.
The UW Quantum System Engineering (QSE) Group takes its responsibility to help win the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) very seriously, and our group's specific role under ARO/MURI is described at length in our Army-sponsored MURI White Paper.
Our QSE Group's broader contributions to winning the GWOT—as we conceive this contributions—are described in these slides, and can be summarized as "opening new resource frontiers".
We are equally committed to our NIH-sponsored mission "to uncover new knowledge that will lead to better health for everyone" and our NSF-sponsored mission "to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; and to secure the national defense."
Our QSE Group's role in these NIH and NSF missions is described in these slides and in our FAQ, and can be summarized as "creating a Corps of Discovery."
I(a). Why failure is not an option
As engineers, our QSE Group believes that in the next few decades either all three sponsor missions will be achieved swiftly and efficiently, or all three will falter. There's not much middle ground, because these missions are closely coupled.
We therefore regard each of our sponsor missions as being so crucial that in the words of Apollo flight director Gene Kranz, "failure is not an option." Meaning, not that failure is impossible, but rather that all possible measures must be undertaken to prevent it.
We, the scientists and engineers of the QSE Group and the ARO/MURI Program, are developing technologies that will provide some of the key strategic resources that are required for victory in the GWOT. Thus, the slide below is the talk's central focus: all the other slides either lead up to it, or draw conclusions from it.
Click here for further discussion, and to see the slide without the fly-in banner.
As background, our QSE Group's work for the last several years has focussed on quantum microscopy, namely, a new kind of microscope for observing individual atoms, in situ, in three dimensions, non-destructively, with Angstrom-scale resolution (see our FAQ for more details).
The slide below gives an overview of the "biospace" resource frontier that quantum microscopy will open: a frontier sufficiently vast as to exert a transforming effect on the economics and strategy of winning the GWOT, and also to help achieve urgent NIH and NSF missions far more swiftly and efficiently.
II(a). The scientific breakthroughs are in-hand
The scientific breakthroughs needed to achieve quantum microscopy are already in-hand, thanks in large measure to the remarkable single-spin experiments of Dan Rugar's IBM Group.
II(b). The role of quantum system engineering (QSE)
With the advent of the ARO/MURI Program, our QSE Group is now beginning to focus on the next development stage, which includes quantum system simulation/emulation/integration, information-based performance metrics, confidence-building in the broader scientific community, and teamwork among sponsor agencies.As quantum system engineers, our job is to develop and deploy enabling tools for exploring this new biospace frontier, and to create a uniting environment within which individual scientific, engineering, business, and strategic breakthroughs can happen easily.
We are firm believers in a saying of Paul Dirac, that a Golden Age occurs when "ordinary people can make extraordinary contributions." The main strategic role of quantum system engineering, in our view, is to provide radically new tools that will help create such a golden age in the 21st Century.
Click here to see the slide without the fly-in banner.
While waiting for seminar rooms to fill, we show this "preview" slide on the screen. Its main purpose was to give the mathematicians in the audience some abstract ideas to think about.
With a war to help win, and urgent engineering problems to solve, our QSE Group welcomes all the help we can get from pure mathematicians and fundamental physicists.
Even abstract questions—like the question on the slide—sometimes lead to answers that have profound engineering consequences, and therefore important strategic consequences too, and so we don't mind asking such questions.
III(a). Reading list
A basic reading list for this talk is chapters 2, 8, and 9 of Michael Neilsen and Isaac Chuang's excellent and comprehensive textbook Quantum Computation and Quantum Information (widely known to physics students as "Mike and Ike"), plus a preprint by Beylkin and Mohlenkamp (available here).
At a more advanced level, the on-line technical essays by Carlton Caves are well worth reading.
Further discussion
For further discussion (and to see the slide without the fly-in banner) click here.
The slide below pays tribute to Gregory Beylkin and Martin Mohlenkamp's pioneering work, which provides the main starting point for our QSE Group's new P-time algorithms for quantum system simulation.
In a nutshell, our QSE Group has found that Beylkin and Mohlenkamp's methods can be readily extended to dynamical systems by a two-fold trick: (1) introduce noise, and (2) convert the noise to an equivalent measurement processes. The second step exploits the same unitary invariance of operator-sum representations that plays a central role in quantum measurement and computing theory.
The noise-equivalent measurement process compresses quantum trajectories onto low-dimensional manifolds—which we call "gabions"—where the trajectories can be integrated using polynomial-time algorithms of Beylkin-Mohlenkamp type.
The illustration at lower left shows a gabion. The word "gabion" is an engineer-type joke, a gabion being a commonplace object that everyone has seen, but only engineers can name (here's a modern gabion and some older gabions). We will see that the name "gabion" is quite descriptive of the fuzzy definition and porous boundaries of the manifold of noise-compressed trajectories.
Analogous to the satellite, quantum computing technologies fly high above the gabion manifold; they require high-order quantum coherence, and therefore belong to simulation complexity class EXP. Analogous to the helicopter, quantum microscopes fly low over the gabion manifold; they require only low-order quantum coherence, and so belong to the simpler simulation complexity class of P-space and P-time.
IV(a). Formal definitions and conjectured nesting relations
Formally, it is natural to define a gabion as a set consisting of a pair of mathematical objects: an LBM manifold and a synoptic set. Based on strong numerical evidence, our QSE Group conjectures that these two objects can be nested, as described below.
LBM manifolds have an algebraic definition: "An LBM manifold is the set of Hilbert states that can be represented as a sum of product states of Beylkin-Mohlenkamp type, as further constrained by a link matrix". Link matrices are defined on this slide; they are additional linear constraints applied to Beylkin-Mohlenkamp separated representations.
Synoptic sets have an information-theoretic definition: "A synoptic set is the set of Hilbert states sampled by quantum simulation trajectories in the presence of a noise-equivalent measurement process." The word "synoptic" reminds us that noise has been replaced by an equivalent measurement process, such that a hidden observer is acquiring covert information.
Our
numerical work suggests that synoptic sets and LBM manifolds can
be nested, rather like the Russian matryoshka dolls at
left. That is, for a specified noise level in a quantum
simulation, then for a sufficiently large (but still polynomial)
rank, an LBM manifold exists that is large enough to hold (most
of) the synoptic set. And conversely, for a specified LBM
manifold that is embedded in a Hilbert space endowed with a
specified (but arbitrary) dynamical Hamiltonian, then for a
sufficiently large noise-equivalent measurement process, an
arbitrarily large fraction of synoptic trajectories will fit
within that LBM manifold.
In practical terms, suppose we have a LBM manifold and a synoptic set, and we wish to nest them; this nested structure we will call a gabion. We can either (1) increase the noise level of the synoptic trajectories (or alternatively, adapt the noise-equivalent quantities being measured) until the synoptic set shrinks to fit within the LBM gabion, or (2) we can increase the rank (or alternatively, adjust the link matrix) of the LBM manifold until it grows large enough (and has the proper shape, as adjusted by the link matrix) to hold the synoptic set.
In either case, the practical engineering consequence is that we can then simulate the quantum system using only P-time and P-space resources (as described in a later slide).
Formal proofs of such "nesting relations" (as our QSE Group calls them) would be a welcome and very necessary addition to the literature on P-time and P-space quantum simulation. These proofs would strongly resemble well-known finite-element proofs, which show that by the use arbitrarily small finite elements, various continuum mechanical processes can be simulated within arbitrarily small error. The construction of such proofs is challenging, and there is a vast and still-growing literature on them, because possibilities like chaotic dynamical behavior must be taken into account.
IV(b). Compatibility with quantum error correction
As an aside, nesting relations do not obstruct progress in quantum computation, for the following reason: the ancilla bits used in quantum error correction represent (effectively) a continuous enlargement of the Hilbert space, such that the above nesting relations—which are conjectured for fixed-dimension Hilbert spaces—do not constrain the design of error-correcting quantum computers.
Click here to see the slide without the fly-in banner.
This slides shows that Beylkin and Mohlenkamp's work can be extended to yield robust dynamical simulation algorithms for "tough" quantum systems: no symmetry, no spatial ordering, high temperature, noisy environments.
Such non-ideal systems are ill-suited to the analysis techniques used by most quantum physicists. Yet they are ubiquitous in quantum system engineering, and so we require new analysis techniques that can handle them robustly and efficiently.
Click here to see the slide without the fly-in banner.
The presentation covered (in considerable detail) how to further extend these robust techniques to analyze systems of hundreds of spins, or even thousands, using only P-space and P-time resources.
Our engineering target is, of course, the intricate spin systems comprised by biological tissues, since the magnetic moments of these spins constitute the imaging signature of our "radar for molecules" technology.
The linked-representation quantum equations of motion are the key to our P-time simulation algorithms. These are the blue equations in the slide below (they are more easily seen with the banner removed).
Click here to see the slide without the fly-in banner.
Next, we reviewed the strategic roles of large-system engineering simulation. The literature on such simulations is growing exponentially, and has become predominantly Chinese. This raises numerous "hot button" issues, such as globalization, chronic trade imbalances, declining engineering enrollments in the western nations, the indeterminate loyalty of multinational corporations, and the shifting balance of strategic power.
A paradox of the large-system simulation literature is that it is remarkably open, and it yet has central strategic significance. So why aren't these capabilities kept secret, as was common practice in the 20th Century?
The force of this paradox is reduced if we recall that completely open strategies can be remarkably subtle: chess for example combines complete strategic openness with great subtlety.
In the globalized 21st Century marketplace, the advantages of open system engineering over closed system engineering are becoming increasingly dominant. Open system engineering projects find it easier to build technical confidence, attract investors, and (eventually) assert market dominance. Also, in market segments that are wide-open and fully competitive, the added costs and slower pace of closed system engineering projects can no longer be tolerated.
In addition, a widespread culture of open system engineering greatly benefits engineering education. For any expanding technical economy, preserving the vigor of engineering education is a strategic necessity.
The citations in the slide below were drawn from a BibTeX database containing 1,978 recent articles appearing in the Chinese Journal of System Simulation (CJSS). The open display of top-level engineering talent in journals like CJSS has been essential in transforming China into an irresistible high-technology business partner for such traditionally American companies as General Electric and IBM.
Bowing to market pressure, these companies recognize that they can no longer be "American"; their primary loyalty must now be to their multinational shareholders and customers. As IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano famously told The New York Times: "IBM wants to be part of China's strategy."
Hence, the new vitality, in the 21st Century, of a famous Chinese business strategy that is mentioned on the slide: "Deceive the sky to cross the ocean." In other words, if your plans will be fulfilled in any case, then you need make no secret of them. This is the strategy we call "Open Strategic Advantage" (OSA).
Click here to see the slide without the fly-in banner.
VIII. Creating an American Strategy for the 21st Century
VIII(a) The urgent need for an American Strategy
Some analysts assert that America has no viable strategic response to globalization. E.g., Clyde Prestowitz:
If you ask an American CEO if he or she wants to be part of America's strategy, none of them can answer the question. Because America doesn't have a strategy.
Other analysts assert that no strategy is necessary. E.g., the Economist for October 1, 2005:
For years to come, China will be more likely to assemble the best computers than to design them.
As engineers, we strongly disagree with the Economist's negative opinion of China's innovative capability. We have the highest respect for the talents of our Chinese engineering colleagues, and in our view, it is only a matter of time (a very short time) before even flagship American companies like Intel and Boeing face direct competition from China at the highest technological levels.
IBM CEO Sam Palmisano outlined what we consider to be a viable American technological strategy in a resent speech (summary here, complete text here) delivered at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute:In the 21st century, innovation is not a nice-to-have. In an era when commoditization happens at unprecedented speed, innovation has become an economic and societal imperative. ...Our first task must be to embrace a new model of innovation—one that is open, collaborative, multidisciplinary and global.
Second: for collaborative innovation to flourish, we must rethink our ideas about intellectual property.
Finally: we must focus on developing the next generation of innovation leaders.
Our QSE Group broadly agrees with the strategy that Palmisano advocates.
In Palmisano's brief speech (only 4200 words), the words "innovation" and "innovative" appear more than sixty times, in strongly-worded passages like these:
Let's take a step back and consider the global transformation that is now underway, and the urgency this transformation brings to our national innovation agenda. ...Will America keep up with the pace of innovation being now set in places like Korea, Finland, India and China, or will we fall behind? Will we restore the innovation prowess that drove our success in the 20th century? Make no mistake: this isn't a space race. This is not about America against the world. But it is very much about America maintaining its strength and competitiveness in an increasingly integrated world economy. ...
Our future innovation leaders must come to us prepared not only with technical expertise, but with the strategic acumen necessary to spark truly innovative ideas. ...
The opportunities are too important, and the economic stakes are too high, for America to compromise its longstanding commitment to innovation.
As engineers, it is our job to turn Palmisano's prescription for American and global innovation into practical reality. Necessarily, much of our work is technical and detail-oriented, and these are the slides that are not on this web page, but rather in the PDF and PowerPoint versions of this talk.
VIII(b). The rationale for strategic balance
We agree with Palmisano that "this is not about America against the world." Ideally, an American Strategy will provide a natural balance to the China Strategy, such that neither strategy is defeated, but each strengthens the other, and provides a better life for all citizens.
The American Strategy that we will describe is no more intrinsically American than the China Strategy is intrinsically Chinese. Both strategies are open, in the sense that any nation can embrace them, and both strategies pursue the same universal goals: security, health, progress, education, and jobs.
Our QSE Group regards these five goals—security, health, progress, education, and jobs—as so central to our work that we have adopted them as the main focus of our MURI posters. We will now describe how our work contributes to these goals.
VIII(c). A famous American strategy: the US Army's Corps of Discovery
This talk's analysis of American Strategy begins by paying tribute to one of the Army's most strategically significant endeavors—Lewis and Clark's "Corps of Discovery"—and to one of America's greatest science and engineering program managers: Thomas Jefferson.
In our view, the opening of the 21st Century's quantum biospace frontier will have similar strategic consequence to Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase. Specifically, the quantum biospace frontier will provide the needed resources for a strong, near-term "American Strategy" to counterbalance the "China Strategy".
The slide below draws attention to the following strategic parallels:
Note: the above analysis owes much to Stephen E. Ambrose's Undaunted Courage: Lewis & Clark and the American West.
VIII(d). Part I of an American Strategy: Embrace and Extend the China Strategy
The first part of our 21st Century American Strategy—as our QSE Group is presently implementing it—is to embrace and extend the China Strategy. Specifically, we are deploying our new engineering simulation tools openly, with the goal of building technical confidence as rapidly as feasible, thereby catalyzing scientific, business and strategic partnerships.
Building technical confidence is essential, because developing quantum microscopy to the level of deployment will at least as expensive as launching a small satellite. Reliable methods for risk recognition and mitigation are vital.
Nowadays, all satellite designs are simulated end-to-end before launch, and this is increasing true of all mechatronic products, including airplanes, automobiles, computer chips, ships, and missiles. These products require substantial investments, and without a working simulation to provide confidence, investors will decline to participate.
Until recently, most quantum system could not be simulated end-to-end, and this has been a substantial barrier to large-scale investment in quantum technologies. Our MURI/MOQSI program's new P-time and P-space simulation algorithms—if their early promise is fulfilled—will provide an urgently needed breakthrough.
This is why ordinary American citizens have an important stake in abstract concepts like "P-space and P-time simulation": these ideas are essential tools by which we quantum system engineers create jobs. They are an enabling technology for an American Strategy that embraces the China Strategy and rapidly extends it to the quantum biospace frontier.
VIII(e). Part II of an American Strategy: the Kikuchi Option
To provide a target for our next round of quantum simulations, our QSE Group recently held a meeting to design a device with the following performance characteristics:
To envision the size of the market, and to grasp the software required to unify and curate the data flowing from these devices, we held a group "auction" to predict how many such devices might be sold and their market valuation. Every member of the group, except one, predicted a market of about 5K molecular imaging machines, with a market valuation of about $1M each.
Pre-medical student Chris Kikuchi was the sole exception. He predicted a market of 1M machines, with a market valuation of about $5K each. Kikuchi's prediction met with a storm of criticism. A million desktop molecular imaging machines seemed much too many, and a market valuation of $5K per machine seemed much too cheap.
Gradually, though, the rest of our QSE Group realized that the Kikuchi number (as we call it) of one million machines is very reasonable, and so is the price point of $5K. Mechatronic development expenses are front-loaded: it is the first device that is expensive, not the millionth. In particular, the incremental cost of software—the most expensive and sophisticated part of a quantum imaging device—is nearly zero. And at a price point of $5K, it is easy to imaging selling a million imaging devices.
What is harder to imagine is what humanity will do with the resulting flood of biospatial information: which will be about 3 petacoordinates per year (i.e., about 3x10^15 coordinates). This is a million times more information, each year, than was gathered during the entire Human Genome Project. As we noted on a previous slide, surveying this nearly-infinite domain will be the largest scientific project that humanity has ever undertaken, and the knowledge gained will be among the 21st Century's greatest new resources.
The essence of part II of the American Strategy -- as our QSE Group is presently implementing it -- is not to envision all that we will do with this new biospace frontier, but rather, simply to open this frontier as wide as possible, and let the imagination and entrepeneurism of the American (and global) citizenry do the rest.
This second-half strategy is characteristically American, in that it embodies an optimistic view of an unbounded future, while placing considerable faith in the imagination and voluntary cooperation of free citizens in exploiting new frontiers.
VIII(f). The requirement of simple, open explanation
Our QSE Group recognizes and respects the consensus opinion of historians of technology that ...
The key to the timing that turns a discovery or invention into successful innovation lies in whether laymen can envision its possibilities.
The above quote is from Alan Beyerchen's essay From Radio to Radar: Interwar Military Adaptation to Technological Change in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which can be found in Williamson Murray's and Allan Millet's excellent and thought-provoking Military Innovation in the Interwar Period.
As Beyerchen's essay recommends, our QSE Group takes great pains to explain to thoughtful citizens what we are doing and why we are doing it, as clearly and simply as we can (this web page is an example).
VIII(g). More lessons-learned from Lewis and Clark expedition
Exploring new territory is never easy. Despite Jefferson's acknowledged greatness, the Lewis and Clark expedition was the fourth expedition he organized to explore the Louisiana Territories; all three earlier expeditions were complete failures.
As commanding Lieutenant John Armstrong plaintively noted after the failure of Jefferson's third expedition (in 1790), "This is a business much easier plan'd than executed."
In consequence, the US Army uses the Lewis and Clark Expedition as a teaching example of the inevitability (and even the beneficial aspects) of mission creep:
As we quantum system engineers prepare our expeditionary journey into the new frontier of quantum biospace, we take these lessons-learned very seriously.As the scope of the [Corps of Discovery] expedition came into sharper focus, its size increased five-fold, and demonstrated that "mission creep" is a fundamental element of every military operation across the span of centuries. [...] Mission creep is a phenomenon that should be fully recognized within the planning process for any operation. The lack, or presence, of sufficient resources has always been a prerequisite of failure or success in any military operation.
VIII(h). Achieving all that our forebears challenged us to accomplish
At the bottom of the slide below are pictures of Linus Pauling, John von Neumann, and Richard Feynman. All three of these physicists recognized the scientific, economic, and strategic importance of atomic-resolution microscopy (as described here), and they worked hard to achieve it ... but they failed, and they knew that they had failed.
This is why Feynman in particular explicitly challenged us to do better.
Now, in the 21st Century, it is our generation's turn, and we are confident that we are going to succeed.
Click here to see the slide without the fly-in banner.
The title of this section is a quotation from a recent Foreign Affairs article by K. N. Cukier.
Cukier's principle expresses the central strategic rationale for our ARO/MURI quantum microscopy program, namely, that the scientific and technological ideas of quantum microscopy, and the global economic and strategic implications of the exponentially large bioinformatic frontier that quantum microscopy promises to help open, will provide a major new resource that will help win the GWOT and concomitantly advance the NIH and NSF missions.
Over the next 18 months, we have reasonable technical grounds to project that end-to-end quantum simulations of realistic quantum microscope designs, running in P-space and P-time, will establish that quantum microscopy can go "all the way" to comprehensive atomic-resolution imaging, i.e., there are no show-stoppers in the fundamental physics.
In short, "If we build it, it will work."
Achieving this goal will fulfill the challenge of Feynman, von Neumann, and Pauling, and as they foresaw, will create new opportunities and resources that will irrevocably alter the global scientific, economic, and strategic landscape.
Finishing the job—that is, developing quantum microscope technology to the point of deployment—will be at least as difficult as orbiting a small satellite, or designing and manufacturing a new model of laserprinter. These three technologies (satellites, laser printers, and quantum microscopes) are of a comparable complexity, size, and mechatronic sophistication, and none are easy to develop.
Essential to this painstaking process is the closest possible coupling of science and engineering. The phrase "no showstoppers in the fundamental physics" leaves plenty of room for non-fundamental noise mechanisms, which must be carefully observed (the role of experimentalists), thoroughly analyzed (the role of mathematicians and theoreticians), and ingeniously mitigated (the role of engineers).
The end-to-end P-time and P-space simulations that are a major focus of our QSE Group's present research embody the science and technology that unifies this development effort, thus providing everyone with a clear description of their role and confidence that "if we build it, it will work."
To make quantum microscopy happen, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians will have to work closely with program managers and business people. Working alone, no one group can conceive, design, fabricate, and deploy this technology, but working together, success is reasonably assured.
Therefore, we quantum system engineers are extraordinarily optimistic about the future. We see that there is plenty of work to do, for everyone.
IX(b). Strategic summary
Quantum system engineering and quantum microscopy -- if they continue their present pace of development -- can play a central role in helping to create the abundant resources needed to win the Global War on Terrorism, and also needed to realize urgent NIH and NSF missions more swiftly and efficiently.
This resource creation can occur in the relatively near term, by a technical path that can be foreseen in reasonable detail, and on a scale large enough to exert an immediate global economic and strategic impact.
This path constitutes an "American Strategy" that provides a natural balance to the "China Strategy", such that neither strategy is defeated, but each strengthens the other, and provides a better life for all citizens.
When resources are abundant, a great many challenges become easier to meet; this especially is true of vital strategic challenges like winning the Global War on Terrorism, and of vital economic challenges like defining a vigorous American role in a globalized world economy, and of vital medical challenges like the global pandemics of AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and (perhaps) an emerging avian influenza pandemic.
IX(c). Quantum microscopy: "the project of a lifetime"
In a globalized world full of risk and uncertainty, there are not many projects whose favorable outcome would benefit everybody on the planet. The development and deployment of quantum microscopy is one such project. This is why our QSE Group's lead engineer, Morrison Chair Professor Joe Garbini, calls quantum microscopy "the project of a lifetime".
Click here to see the slide with the scientists named.
We had a wonderful February visit to Tohoku University's COE Program for Future Medical Engineering, the Esashi-Ono-Tanaka Nanomechanics Laboratory, the Jeol Corporation, and Tokyo University's New Materials Science Laboratory. The aggregate PowerPoint presentation is here.
Thank you, Japanese colleagues and (now) friends, for a wonderful visit!
We updated our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) with a section entitled "How large is the quantum microscopy frontier?"
Our congratulations to IBM's MRFM Team for their single-spin breakthrough!
Our 2004 AAAS talk 3D Quantum Biomicroscopy: We Must See, We Will See is now available on-line.