UO physics professor talks about his advocacy for quantum technology, then and now

To harness what’s known about fundamental elements of the universe?

That’s a goal worth supporting beyond any politics, say science advocates like Michael Raymer, a semiretired University of Oregon physics professor. 

Nearly 10 years ago, Raymer pushed federal lawmakers to create what’s known as the National Quantum Initiative.

The initiative is helping push mind-bending ideas of quantum mechanics further into the realm of technology development.

“The new technology is birthed from a newfound understanding of how the world works,” Raymer wrote in his 2017 book, “Quantum Physics: What Everyone Needs to Know.” Such breakthroughs could result in advanced encryption, more precise sensors and computers able to solve problems not possible with current technology.

Now, reauthorization of the federal law supporting the effort is playing out against a backdrop of potentially wider changes in how the government provides funding for science.  

Raymer, 74, speaks proudly of what the federal initiative he helped shape has accomplished. It has worked “to provide a framework to advance the science while keeping a very close eye on near-term applications,” Raymer said.

But he has fears about the increasing involvement of politicians in decisions about science funding. Raymer joined what news organization ProPublica reported Monday as “thousands” of scientists who submitted public comments opposing a draft federal rule that would give political appointees more authority to award or terminate research funding grants.

“The reason the U.S. system has been so strong, and has pulled down the large majority of Nobel Prizes, is because the scientists run the science,” Raymer said. “It’s not run by the government.”

President Donald Trump in 2018 signed the law creating the National Quantum Initiative. Now, Raymer has concerns about science funding and policy ideas being put into action by the current Trump administration.

“If they go too far in top-down political control of science, it will harm the U.S. science community and the ability to innovate and to produce new economic benefits,” Raymer said.

Experiments lead to technology 

Research in the field known as quantum information science has long been thought to hold promise for developing advanced technology. 

Quantum mechanics, a branch of physics, uses the mathematics of probability to essentially map out physical properties of tiny particles and photons, units of light. 

In computing, the basic advantage is the creation of “complex, multidimensional computational spaces,” as described by IBM, one of several large companies working to create quantum computers.

By adding complexity beyond what’s available in computers now, there can be “dramatic speed-ups for certain problems,” in particular “when quantum computers and high-performance classical supercomputers work together,” according to IBM.

Such a pairing is the leading edge of technology — and a long way from what Raymer recalls from decades ago.

“Back to the ’90s, all this was not clear,” Raymer said. Everything was “still at the levels of basic research.” Physicists and mathematicians were “just thinking about what’s possible in this sort of science-fiction world,” he said.

“But as experiments progressed, and some here that I did at Oregon, we got more and more of a handle on how to control, how to measure quantum systems, how to measure quantum states,” Raymer said.

A quantum state can be defined in different ways, but Raymer, in his scholarly writing, has described it as “an underlying structure of information about a physical system.”

His lab’s “semifamous” contribution was being one of the first to “actually measure a quantum state of light,” he said.

White House meeting

Along with writing about quantum science concepts for the general public, Raymer found himself in a position to help shape what would become the National Quantum Initiative.

The story begins with an October 2016 invitation to the White House, in the last few months of Barack Obama’s presidency, to discuss quantum information science.

The gathering, convened by the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy, brought together about 80 people from industry and research universities, Raymer recalled.

“I almost felt like a fly on the wall at that point because I was still kind of new to this area of public advocacy,” Raymer said.

The general sentiment, as Raymer recalls it, of “all these famous people” was that more needed to be done to keep the United States from falling behind other countries when it came to quantum research and technologies.

But it wasn’t until after the White House meeting that Raymer began to step into a role of actually shaping such a plan.

Later that month, Raymer described the White House meeting to Liz Rogan, the chief executive officer of a professional scientific organization, the Optical Society of America, now known as Optica, which represents the interests of thousands of scientists in academia and industry.

“As I remember it, I said, ‘Liz, somebody really has to do something about this,’ and then Liz said, ‘OK, Mike, you’re going to do it,’” Raymer said.

Raymer agreed, and about two months later gave a presentation to the organization’s leadership.

“Of course, the U.S. had been funding quantum science for 30 years,” Raymer said. But “the U.S. did not have a coordinated program, so I said, ‘Let’s do that.’”

Leadership of the organization agreed, and Raymer began working with lobbyists. He wrote a two-page white paper to present to a U.S. House of Representatives committee.

When it came time to make the presentation, Raymer called a friend, Christopher Monroe, a professor at Duke University and a pioneer in quantum computing, to speak to legislators.

“He took my two-page white paper. He took it over to the House science committee, and gave them an oral report,” Raymer said. “They loved it. They said, ‘OK, now we want you to write a 10-page report, to flesh out what this thing would be.’”

Raymer said he recruited a group of some 20 industry and university scientists to work on the larger document. The effort continued with Raymer and Monroe meeting with congressional staffers.

It was a success, with the next step being a draft of the bill that would establish the National Quantum Initiative.

“The cool thing was, after they wrote the first draft, they sent it to Chris and myself and said, ‘Please read this and see what you think,’” Raymer said.

But there was a problem.

“We said, ‘We hate it,’” Raymer recalled. The early draft of the bill named the U.S. Department of Energy as the lead organization for the initiative, but the “Department of Energy had never previously done any research in quantum information science,” Raymer said, musing that “politicians or somebody” had intervened to steer dollars to the federal agency.

“We wanted it to be equally run by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, and so that’s how they rewrote it, and we got it,” Raymer said.

In an era of political gridlock, Raymer had played a major role in creating a policy establishing new funding for scientists and opportunities to collaborate — despite some naysayers when Raymer first began talking up the idea.

The process took about 18 months from that first presentation to passage of the bill establishing the National Quantum Initiative.

“We got a billion dollars, which was unheard of at the speed at which it progressed,” Raymer said.

Outspoken

Raymer’s no longer involved in lobbying efforts, but he’s quick to speak about the principles that guide him, then and now.

“Humans love to solve problems. They love to puzzle about curiosities, and they love to do intellectual work that advances our understanding of nature,” Raymer said. 

In Raymer’s view, this driving force powers not only science, but other areas of study including philosophy, literature and “even religion.”

“All those things are in a way driven by the same kind of human curiosity. So you know, as an academic, I just think that’s a public good,” Raymer said.

Since the National Quantum Initiative became reality, Raymer said venture capitalists have poured money into startup companies while established companies like IBM and Google have also made strides.

“In the past three years, they’ve made astounding progress, much faster than anybody expected, in learning how to build a quantum computer,” Raymer said.

He’s quick to point out the role of universities and grant funding from the National Quantum Initiative in developing a workforce.

“All those people were trained in universities. They weren’t trained in industry or government, and [they have been] partly trained by funds provided by the National Quantum Initiative,” Raymer said.

This year, U.S. Sens. Todd Young, R-Ind., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., have touted reauthorization of the act.

Raymer pointed out that the original bill said, “We’re going to spend five or six years doing more basic science and trying to consolidate the science and building large teams nationwide, which we’ve done.”

The new version, touted as having bipartisan support, is now focused “on applications and trying to build something that actually works,” Raymer said.

“That’s fine,” Raymer said. “The only worry is that if you cut out the basic research pipeline, you’re not going to have the new discoveries and the new people entering the workforce that can actually make the applications happen. So they have to be very careful in how they design that.”

But Raymer and others have concerns about the draft federal rule that would reshape funding.

“They’re now talking about having every federal grant be subject to approval by a political appointee, and that’s never been done in this country,” Raymer said. “It’s been done in other countries, I would argue, to great detriment to the scientific honesty and openness of a system.”

There are concerns and anxieties about science in the United States.

“The rest of the world has now caught up to where the U.S. was dominating, you know, 40 years ago, and that’s a crisis of identity for the country,” Raymer said.

He remains optimistic, however, about the future of science in the United States, certainly in quantum information science. 

The advances in artificial intelligence are “like a friendly competition, in the sense that the ultimate system will be a quantum computer and a digital computer running AI collaboratively, together, Raymer said.

He said “crises” lead to the creation of new systems.

“The question is: Will it be a bad system or a good system? And I believe it’ll be a good system,” Raymer said.

University of Oregon research

Raymer’s old lab is now known as the Center for Optical, Molecular, and Quantum Science. It’s led by Brian Smith, whose team in June won a $4 million National Science Foundation grant to create a prototype for a quantum network.

“We’re learning how to do that,” Raymer said.

While retired from teaching, Raymer remains active in research and is a part of Smith’s team.

The idea is to send data on single photons rather than large groups of photons.

“Then, with single photons, you’re at the quantum level, where you have to control every photon individually,” Raymer said. “And that’s the goal.”

He gave a real-world example how such a network could be useful because of its enhanced encryption capabilities.

 “If you had a large research campus, like a big medical campus, and they had to share secure data throughout the campus, you could wire that up with optical fibers, and all their computers could be connected by this quantum optical network,” Raymer said.

The project, if considered successful, would be eligible for a larger National Science Foundation grant, Raymer said.

His title at UO is professor of physics and Philip H. Knight professor of liberal arts and sciences emeritus. He was named a Knight professor in 2006, with the professorships awarded based on merit only.

Raymer’s honors include winning UO’s Outstanding Career award in 2015. He has also served as the founding editor-in-chief for an academic journal, Optica Quantum.

‘I just really enjoy it’

Growing up, Raymer said there were no college graduates in his military family. His father was a Navy pilot born in the Ozark mountains of Missouri, and the family moved often. He said he was born on Naval Air Station North Island, a base in Coronado, California.

Raymer said he views the lives of his parents, Gordon and Dorothy, as a “success story,” as their families were from what would be considered “lower-class” backgrounds.

“They were always very encouraging, open-minded,” Raymer said. “You know, they may have held conservative political ideas, but they were always open-minded to all ideas, which I really appreciate.”

Early in life, “teachers thought I was good at math,” Raymer said. “But I wasn’t that interested in it. I was just a goof-off kid who wanted to go skateboarding all the time.”

In high school, he’d go to the library and “read stuff by Einstein,” Raymer said. “But I didn’t tell my friends that much that I was doing that.”

Raymer enrolled at the University of California, Santa Cruz — “Still laid back, not working super-hard.”

Things changed for Raymer in graduate school at the University of Colorado, when he began working closely with people developing ways to solve incredibly challenging problems, “some of the brightest people in the world.”

“They rubbed off on me,” Raymer said. “And I realized, OK, these people do science 24/7. They’re thinking about it all the time, and that’s how they make progress.”

“That’s pretty much what I still do now,” said Raymer, who lives in Eugene. “I just really enjoy it. I wake up Sunday morning, you know, 6 a.m., and I’m thinking about a physics problem.”

Raymer spoke about his own early aspirations from those days at Colorado, and how he views his career.

“I never thought I was on their level. I still don’t. But my goal was — I was very humble — I thought, if I can even do one thing that makes an impact on physics, you know, permanently, I’ll be happy,” Raymer said.

“I’ve done more than one thing, I think,” he said. “So I’m happy.”