Lafl amme acting as director). “Because the rest of the world is just starting to wake up to this, we have an advantage,” says Lafl amme. There’s even talk of Canada, and the Waterloo area in particular, as a “Quantum Valley” — a technology hub forming “the epicentre of the next information revolution,” as IQC’s website proclaims. Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and a popular science blogger, agrees “Canada is punching way, way above its weight,” noting there’s more quantum research going on in southern Ontario than at MIT. “I think Mike Lazaridis had an incredibly far-sighted vision,” Aaronson says. “Waterloo basically went from being not on the map in these areas [of research] to being the biggest place in the world for quantum computing and information.”
W
hen Martin Laforest was an undergraduate at McGill University, Lafl amme dropped by to deliver a lecture and to look for possible IQC recruits. Laforest remem-
bers being immediately hooked on the idea of quantum compu- tation — he “drank the quantum Kool-Aid,” as he puts it. The aff able 34-year-old physicist is now the senior manager of scien- tifi c outreach at IQC, and one aſt ernoon a few months back he gave me a tour of its many labs. He showed me enormous rooms with shiny canisters of liquid nitrogen; rooms with yellow signs that warn visitors about strong magnetic fi elds; and
rooms where peculiar hums seem to emanate from the ceiling. A “clean room” for preparing materials — apparently you need several months of training before you’re allowed in — is bathed in pinkish-orange light. The fi nal lab on our tour is built around a forest of polished
steel tubes and drums, running a dozen metres in length and branching off this way and that; many component parts, but clearly forming a unifi ed whole. Along the perimeter are gauges, dials and cables. This giant silver beast (which Laforest aff ec- tionately calls “the behemoth”) is the Omicron-Oxford multi- cluster thin fi lm system, a $5-million instrument designed for ultra-high vacuum deposition — a method for producing quantum materials in the form of crystals and thin fi lms, one layer of atoms at a time. These thin fi lms, which can be found in today’s computer chips and microsensors, are expected to play an important role in tomorrow’s quantum devices. Still, it’s the quantum computer — with the power to blitz through a gazillion calculations in the blink of an eye — that is seen as the big prize, the Holy Grail of quantum information science. And while most researchers say they’re working on it, a company in Burnaby, BC, called D-Wave Systems, claims it has already built a 512-qubit quantum computer — far more impressive than the dozen qubits Lafl amme and his colleagues at IQC have been working with. D-Wave has sold one of these megacomputers to NASA, one to Lockheed Martin and,
46 | CPA MAGAZINE | JUNE/JULY 2015
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