Perry Corbett
To put it frank, right, these are kind of nuclear arms races, right. The last one was, who could get the bomb, who could get the biggest bomb. The future of the world, whoever's going to be the dominant country, is going to be who can get a real, working, fully commercialized quantum computer, because what was previously encrypted, what was previously impossible to solve it now happens instantly.

President Greg Crawford
Hello, I'm Greg Crawford, President of Miami University, and welcome to "In Such a Place," the podcast where we explore the future of higher education and the vital role colleges and universities play in shaping our world. Quantum technology is no longer science fiction. It's already changing the devices we use, ways we communicate, and how we approach the real world problems. Joining us for this episode is Professor Perry Corbett, the James C. and Carol Garland Assistant Professor of Physics. We'll explore how quantum materials are transforming technology and society, and how higher education can equip students to lead in this rapidly evolving world. Well, welcome to the podcast, Perry. We're so glad to have you here.

Perry Corbett
Thank you. I'm really glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.

President Greg Crawford
Well, let's start with a really big question for question number one. We know a lot of our listeners probably haven't had a physics class in a while, so can you describe at a lay-level what is quantum technology? What is quantum physics? As briefly as you possibly can.

Perry Corbett
Absolutely, yeah, that's a big can of worms. So quantum mechanics, right, is different from our normal world, it's the rules that kind of govern the absolute smallest things, the atoms, the light, you know, the molecules, those sort of things are quantum materials, and the rules there are different. One, there's essentially four that really matter that make the world different from the world humans are used to. One is quantization, and so the energy down there is quantized, and what I mean by that is that the atoms, the molecules, the electrons, the light, it can only have certain energies, like walking up a set of stairs, you go from one step to the next step, you don't really stand in between two steps, where in our normal world you can walk up a ramp smoothly, so that quantization of energy leads to some weirdness, the second, and this is really important for our next generation of, you know, quantum technology that's exploding right now, is superposition. And so superposition is really foreign to all of us, right? It's like you have two open doors right in front of you, and you're able to walk through both doors simultaneously. And so that's what we call superposition. You can kind of do two things at once, the other one, right, is entanglement. Entanglement is one of the key things that are going to change the second quantum revolution, the one we're in now. And that's where you take two particles, to let's say atoms, for example, and those two atoms, they're both trying to walk through sets of doors, right? And if you have, you have them such that when they walk together through four doors, you can't tell who went through what door, right? They kind of all walk through all the doors together, but if suddenly you decide I'm going to cheat the system at peak, you'd then know, oh, Atom A went through door B, that means you know Atom B went through door D, or whatever, right? Some kind of connection there where you can't know their positions or whatever state they're in separate, they're kind of tied together forever. It doesn't matter how far apart they are, which is part of the magic. The last one, right, is the uncertainty principle, and this one, this one actually matters at our day-to-day life. And you can see it, you can test this. You can't know some quantities simultaneously, so like if you tried to measure, let's say, the speed of a car, right, it flies by you, and you take a quick snapshot, you could take a really fast picture, and you'd know the car was right there, right in front of you. But, in the, from the pitcher's perspective, you can't tell how fast it's going. It looks, it could be parked, even right, but if you take a long, slow shot, it blurs the whole car out. You can't tell where the car is anymore, really, because it's kind of across the whole image. But now you know the car is, let's say, shooting to the right really easily, and so that kind of limitation of knowing lots of things all at once leads to these kind of funky things where you can violate laws of physics, violate in quotes, there.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah. No, it's great. Why, why does all this quantum mechanics matter? Why does it matter today, in particular?

Perry Corbett
Yeah, so quantum, right, we're in the 100 years of quantum mechanics. The UN is celebrating the 100 years of quantum mechanics, its birthplace in 1925 the Great Conference where they had all the greatest physicists together of our time. And what's important here is it now allowed a set of technologies to come to pass that make our world possible. And so this is, I'm going to call this the Quantum 1.0, or the first Quantum Revolution. It's powering everything. Your phones are powered by quantum mechanics. The lasers that you scan, your, you know, fruit as you go out the check art, that's quantum mechanics enabled. The MRIs that allow you to be scanned inside your body, so surgeons don't have to cut you open to see what's in there if there's a problem, that's quantum mechanics. And so all those kind of quantum effects led to a revolution in our ability to probe the world around us. Now that was the last 100 years, right? Let's say we're on a kind of a tipping point or inflection point here, where the next 100 years or 50 years we're going to see a new revolution. We will be able to start to see the unseen things that we thought were impossible to compute, even to measure or sense. Now, using superposition and entanglement and uncertainty, we're able to create devices that are so sensitive they can really probe into a level that's like almost unimaginable.

President Greg Crawford
I think it's one of the neat things about quantum mechanics, if you look back to the 1920s and 30s and 1940s and the big names in the quantum world, all the big time physicists, and then in the late 50s, early 60s, the transistor pops onto the scene, right, and it just changes everything. It revolutionizes how we do computing and even the simple things like the calculator, right? So it changed everything, and now we're in another sort of quantum revolution, that's it's just, it's just wild, and you talk about entanglement, you talk about superposition, another uncertainty principle, it's really hard to get your head around it, but just a question for you, before we go on to some detailed questions, when you think back about quantum, and you think about the basic physics that was going on, and presumably there wasn't a whole lot of application at that time, right. And then 20, 30, 40 years later, you see it come on the scene, and then another 20, 30, 40 years later, you see what we have today. Can you talk about why that basic research is important, and and also how it fuels applications in the future, because sometimes you know we have to make that argument when we're looking for National Science Foundation monies or looking for basic research monies. The question is, why study something that may not have an application? What would you say to that?

Perry Corbett
Yeah, that's a great question, especially in our time, right? We generally focus on what the application is, but it's easy to think, very, you know, I want this product to come to market. I want to innovate this. The problem is, when you avoid all basic science, you don't know what new discovery you're going to make, and there's this long history of just, you didn't think this was going to go anywhere, and suddenly it changed the world, right? The one people like to use now, it's not a physics example, but it's CRISPR, you know, is an accidental discovery, but it has revolutionized genetic engineering, and that was pure basic science. If I get it right, I think they were looking at something with single-celled organisms, nothing that accidentally fell upon this gene editing, but in, you know, back in the 1920s right, the problems they were trying to solve were very simple problems, kind of. If you want to start at the fundamentals of where quantum came from, it's in your fluorescent light bulbs, right? If the light coming from your fluorescent lights, if you were to put that through a little prism and you break it up, you get specific colors. You don't get all colors, you don't get a perfect rainbow. And the question is, why do you only get red, blue, and yellow, or, you know, some combination thereof, and that question, that fundamental question of why you're only seeing certain wavelengths, led Niels Bohr to say, well, what if the electron around the atom wasn't kind of like the moon and the earth, where it could kind of be anywhere, right, but it only could exist in specific spots. Those specific spots then give rise to these certain wavelengths, and that quantization made the revolution that had changed the whole, you know, our field of modern technology.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, no, I think it's a great example of science when it started off really basic, yeah, trying to figure out nature--

Perry Corbett
Yeah, the simplest you can imagine.

President Greg Crawford
--transformed into everything that we use today. So we hear this word quantum revolution, yeah, and we hear it over and over and over again, and it's largely because of quantum computing, right? Right, it's a big deal, and we're all kind of flabbergasted by how powerful that computer is. It's mind-boggling how powerful it is. But what does the quantum revolution mean? And in addition to quantum computing, what other kind of things do you think we're going to be seeing in the near future?

Perry Corbett
Right, so the quantum revolution, this 2.0 revolution, as I like to call it, it really sits on three pillars: quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum communications, or you could think quantum internet, and each one of these have a different rate of maturity as we go forward, but they all matter in different aspects of our lives. The quantum computer, as you said, it will revolutionize computing. It can do computations that would take the world's best supercomputers the lifetime of the universe. It can do in minutes, you know. That's like you said, mind-boggling, right? But then there's the next question, right? How do I get to the most advanced tumor finding? You know, how do I get the most best MRI sensitivity that can spot early detection, and this is where quantum sensing, this subfield comes in, where it's going to make huge leaps into healthcare, quality assurance, you know, GPS, these sorts of other fields, and so I think that one has the largest maturity, right, we. Some of these coming to pass right now, some of these quantum materials that exist. The Envy centers in diamond is one of the best examples, where you can now look at the brain at a super detailed level, using this at room temperature, where before it had to be used super cryogenic and ultra expensive. And then there's quantum communications, and that's the ability to send information that's perfectly encrypted, you can't break it, and if someone tried to break it, you'd know they were listening. And so then you go up, somebody tried to listen to my secret message. I know now to change it, or do whatever you need to, whatever protocol is appropriate, you know. And there's a lot of big business behind sending secure information, sending secure wire transfers of money and stuff, so the National Reconnaissance Office, right, that's part of their business model, is sending information across the globe without having people intercept it, whether you know, doesn't have to be for military, it can be, you know, for financial reasons too.

President Greg Crawford
The Miami Physics Department has got some extraordinary quantum scientists, and you are one of them, of course. But can you tell us a little bit at a high level what some of your colleagues are doing as well?

Perry Corbett
Absolutely, so we have four professors that are kind of in our quantum world, and that would be Imran Mirza, and Mirza is a theoretician, so he studies the theoretical aspects of physics. He's really building up the math behind quantum sensing and quantum communications, because right now they're lab demonstrations, right? They're more or less kind of in these controlled environments, and they're specific to how we've built them, but we need the mathematics to describe the behavior of that transfer, and so Imran is working on how to build that math and how to build it robustly and reliably across different platforms. Now, the next two are AMO physicists, that's atomic molecular optical physicists, Samir Bali and Burçin Bayram, they both work, they're a little bit different, but they're related to each other in the same sense that they kind of have similar systems. Sameer Bali looks at trapped atoms, so they use these lasers, and they shine laser light into these ultra high vacuum systems. Now, ultra high vacuum, that's like vacuum that would be equivalent to being outside the International Space Station, there's essentially nothing there. The average distance between two molecules is like a meter, you know. So, it's like the length of a person, you got one on the top of your head, one of the bottom of your feet, and these lasers shine in and they create these kind of traps, like laser tweezers, you could imagine. They let in some atoms and they trap them with these lasers, and by trapping them in very specific ways and bringing the trapped atoms close together, they can do these quantum computations, or these quantum sensing applications. Now, Dr. Bayram, on the other hand, she works in spectroscopy, and so in her lab she will also let in atoms, they actually boil these kinds of metals and they create these molecules and then blast them with these high powered lasers, and then look at the light that's emitted from it, and all that light that's emitted is quantum mechanical in its nature, and those certain energy levels and orbitals, they all become sensitive to the environment they're in, and so that they'll become a foundation for creating different types of quantum sensors, and how those sensors can go bad, because sometimes you're like I want to use this wavelength and it shoots out these light right, but there's some kind of interaction of vibration or something that gets in the way, and so hurt a little bit more on the fundamental side, but really important for building up to these new devices that we want to get to.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, you got you have a very powerful group there, and you kind of hit it just right with all the excitement around quantum these days,

Perry Corbett
That was purely accidental, I think.

President Greg Crawford
Well, here's.. I, you know, as president, I kind of.. I learned things, I learned things about professors like you. Yeah, and I don't know if this story is true or not, but I'm going to go ahead and ask you. But it's rumored that you were an artist before a physicist.

Perry Corbett
Oh, absolutely.

President Greg Crawford
Oh, is that true?

Perry Corbett
Absolutely true.

President Greg Crawford
Okay. Tell us about that.

Perry Corbett
Yeah, I love to. Whenever I give a seminar, colloquium, I like to say I was, you know, a born portrait artist turned experimental physicist, right? I traded the paint brush for, you know, a microscope scan probe tip. So I grew up as an artist. My mother was a professional artist, and so I learned to paint from my mother. So I really focused in, in my mother's footsteps on portrait art, I love to paint people's faces. I'm really captured by the emotions that you can bring from a person's face by adding the right colors, the right form, and shape to it. And I think that has been one of the most important kind of aspects of my life, because it allowed me to connect to people in a way that I think is a deeper level, like I can look at a person's face, and I can see, you know, what makes that that little aspect of their expression, or, you know, the tilt in their head that makes them them, and I realized that art is not about what the artist is trying to tell the audience, right, it's about what the audience. Derives from the piece, and so then I started painting people's portraits who had, you know, expressions or feelings that were a bit ambiguous, and so the art really became about probing what people saw in the piece, and it's almost interesting to see the distribution of responses, you know, I have this one painting, "Girl in Blue," and I make the titles vague on purpose, as to not, you know, disturb your interaction with it, and you know, a lot of people say sad. I see longing, you know, some people see hopefulness, right? I think that's kind of interesting to see the painting is almost a mirror of what the audience is thinking, right, rather than the painting telling the audience what to feel.

President Greg Crawford
Did your art background and growing up in that space help you think about quantum physics, which is very abstract in and of itself? Did that help you become a better physicist?

Perry Corbett
Oh, I absolutely think so. I think there's the advantage of just data analysis, right? When you're a painter or you're an artist, there's a lot of ambiguity. You start with a blank slate and you're building up piece by piece, stroke by stroke, and that kind of comes together, you know, little by little, until it gets this whole sense of unity. Experiments are a lot like that. You start with some hypothesis, you don't know if it's going to work, you have no idea, right? You hope, you have some reason to think, maybe, right, but you have to chip away at it little by little, and as the data comes in, piece by piece, right, you start to see this bigger picture evolve, and it's very similar to working on a piece of artwork. In addition to that, on a practical, professional side, as a physicist, you have to make good figures for your publication, because they got to look good, they got to sell, right. So, there's an aspect of salesmanship there too, and I think being able to write well, being able to draw well, that allowed me to robustly fill out this role as a professor.

President Greg Crawford
So we talked a little bit about the fundamental inquiry piece of quantum mechanics, from the entanglement to superposition to the uncertainty principle, et cetera. But tell us about your own personal laboratory that you run, and also how some of that basic stuff gets into sort of your application thinking, what's the end kind of use of some of these materials that you're working on?

Perry Corbett
I run kind of a two fold lab, so the first half is we grow and make the quantum materials, we do something called sputter epitaxy, it's a specially specialized industrial scaling technique to spray down molten metal, essentially, and collect it on a little chip that we call a substrate, and we can grow that crystal, and by changing the elements that are there, the pressure, the temperature, all these kind of control knobs, we can direct the growth to grow a certain way, which can exhibit special quantum properties. After we grow that crystal, you know, after you take your cookies out of the oven, right, you want to taste them, you want to figure out what's in them, you know. Was this a good idea, or did I mess up this recipe? So, we do that through microscopy. So, we do something called scan probe microscopy, and this technique is a lot like a record player. All right, you take a very sharp needle, and you bring that sharp needle into contact with the material, and then you bring the needle to go back and forth across it, like a record player needle would go over the ridges, and then trace out the profile of that record player ridges, and you get the sound that comes out. The scan probe microscope is a lot like that, in that you take the needle very close to the sample, but instead of tracing out these ridges to get sound, you trace out what the shape of the crystal is, and then not only that, you can use these kind of complex scan probe needles, and you can get out what's its electronic properties, what's its magnetic properties, you know, what's its thermal properties, and by kind of using this to trace out the whole material, you get this beautiful resolved profile of the sample that say the quantum effects are here, they're not here, or maybe there's all quantum effects, and you've swelled it too much, and you need to bring back the recipe.

President Greg Crawford
You talked a little bit about some of your work on quantum fingerprints in the past, yes, and was curious for the general audience. The big takeaway from that research, if you could talk to us a little bit about that.

Perry Corbett
Absolutely, this quantum fingerprints, as I like to say, is we use the microscopes to scan the surface, and then look where the quantum behaviors happen, and in the bismuth selenide materials, bees are very sensitive to light, and not just any light, they're sensitive to polarized light, and so much like you would buy sunglasses with polarized glasses for Gonfis, where it would kind of change the reflection on the water. I can make these bismuth selenide crystals down to little tiny pixels, and those little tiny pixels are sensitive to the polarized light. And it turns out that a lot of objects kind of glow with polarized light, and so this allows us to kind of see things in a new way, which could allow you to detect things that were before were difficult to detect.

President Greg Crawford
And then tell us about materials that you work on.

Perry Corbett
Yeah.

President Greg Crawford
The so-called qubits. Yeah, when people hear this term out there, what does that mean in the physics world?

Perry Corbett
Yeah, so that's another project. So, alongside quantum sensing, I also do materials for quantum computing, and so a qubit is like a computer bit. In a computer bit, either as a zero or a one, a no or a yes. A qubit is different in that it's kind of a yes/no simultaneously, or a zero-one at the same time. This is the superposition that we talked about earlier. So, there are lots of ways to create superpositions in lots of different material systems. One of the ones that we work in our lab, which is funded through the National Science Foundation, is something called superconducting transmon qubits that give you the full fancy name, and what this is, is you take a superconducting material, and that's just a piece of metal that would conduct electricity, just like the copper in your, in your walls, but if you bring it to the right temperature, it conducts electricity so well that there's no resistance. It's like they can go on and on and on forever. Where normally there's some loss by sending electricity through copper. If you turn these superconducting materials into literally little squiggles just the right way, and you kind of bring them close together, the two squiggles, they can overlap their quantum states, the squiggles can, and that quantum state creates a superposition and entanglement, which allows us to create the qubit. What we fundamentally work on in my lab is we're going to build the superconducting materials, we're going to make them. Now, there's a challenge that everybody in the world is facing, and that's the problem of decoherence. Okay, and in decoherence, what that really means is, in a normal computer, right? Let me say it this way, a normal computer, you put your zero, your one on your hard drive, right, or your ram, or whatever, it stays there forever, right? You never even worry that you're gonna open up your laptop and suddenly all your pictures have turned into new pictures, you know. You don't think of it that way, but in quantum computing, the zero and one kind of entangled combination is short-lived. It only lives for milliseconds in length, and that would be considered a long time, right? This is called decoherence time, where the data kind of dissolves into the background, the noise of the universe, and we want to figure out where that decoherence comes from. It's something in the materials, right? We know that it's something in the materials, and so now it's like it can come from a multitude of places. So, in my lab, we're trying to, instead of saying I'm going to make the perfect material, the best material in the world, and then say, does this one give me the best result, I'm instead going to say I'm going to engineer materials across different levels of quality, different axes, and say, well, if I changed it in this way, made it good to bad, does it affect the decoherence, yes or no? If it doesn't, I don't have to worry about that, that's not an engineering problem I need to solve. Maybe it's all in the surface, maybe it's all in the top contact you put down, then I engineer that good to bad. If that changes the decoherence, I know that's what I should focus on.

President Greg Crawford
That's really great. Let's talk about this. So, you walk to a physics lab, you have some discoveries that you've created, and you've found some really cool stuff, and there's wires hanging out. You have a power supply, it's all hooked up. You probably have tin foil wrapped around things, and it's working. And then there's the engineering feat - is how to get this thing eventually to into a device or a product or an application out there. Talk about some of the biggest hurdles that you think we're going to be seeing in the future with some of this quantum technology, as we, you know, figure it out in the laboratory, but then there's a big step of taking it to the commercial world for a device,

Perry Corbett
Yeah, that is a challenge, not just in quantum, but certainly in quantum, that's called the valley of death, as we know it. So, a lot of things you can build it out in the lab, you can make a great material, it can have excellent specs, you know, you're thinking this is this is it, this is going to go somewhere, and the problem is you have to have somebody invest in it, you know, and there's a lot of questions that go into that. Right, is there fab to do it? Is there a supply chain that can keep this running? What's the cost to do small scale versus 10 times this scale? You know, all those kinds of business questions come into play, and a lot of scientists, they don't have that in the back of their heads, you know. So they're always kind of trying to solve a problem and then move it out, but a lot of times they hit this wall of, well, the raw material is too much to actually buy in volume, you know, those sorts of things. And so I think everybody knows that the valley of death is there, everybody in the business is aware of it, right? And I think the government's very much aware of it. There's a change, especially in the National Science Foundation, actually, that they're really with the Chips Act, and all of this, they're bringing in these academic industry partnerships, instead of saying we start in the lab, make a material, I show it has a good property, and then I hold out my material and say, somebody, look, it's really good, I promise, right, we're going to kind of close this linear process into a kind of co-designed loop, where now industry helps guide the academics along a certain pathway, they're involved in the process, so that they go. When it comes to the valley of death, it's not a valley anymore, maybe it's just, you know, a little hurdle this time. So, I think since the government has gotten aware of that, and they're kind of, kind of mitigating this, we're going to seek. Quantum tech and new semiconductor stuff really overcome a lot of these hurdles from the get go, rather than the traditional way that it's been through the last 50 to 70 years.

President Greg Crawford
I think it's fantastic on the partnership programs that the National Science Foundation has started, just as you said, we're kind of parallel processing with our stakeholders in industry, so that the scalability function, the feature, the commercialization feature, how to build the device, you know, after the laboratory actually works out faster than it otherwise would have. Yeah, as we kind of process things in a linear fashion in the past. Now it's a great program.

Perry Corbett
Yeah, I think I think it's really going to change the rate at which the quantum second quantum revolution went about the first one, you know, something like 10 to 30 years, 50 years. This next one, I think we might, we still have kind of the expectation of that timeline, but I think by having programs like this across all of our, you know, funding agencies, we're going to see things go a lot quicker,

President Greg Crawford
Let's talk about students.

Perry Corbett
Yeah, absolutely.

President Greg Crawford
And you know, and Miami says student first, student centered, and student ready as it gets. That's what we put our pride into. Talk to us about an undergraduate student, you know, who loves to tinker absolutely in the physics program, perhaps, and comes to you, and then you hire him up to work in your laboratory. Tell us about those first few days, and yeah, that excitement, and yeah, and what you hope that student gets out of working with you.

Perry Corbett
I take on students across the board, you know, some of my heaviest hitter students are actually my undergraduate students, right? I even have, I have a biology major, for example, working on these quantum materials, growing and scanning them. And so, usually, what an undergraduate comes to me and says, "You know, Dr. Corbett, I'm interested. How can I get involved, right? And you know, I understand. I remember being an undergrad, wasn't that long ago, I hope. You know, but I remember what it's like. You had a lot of classes I worked full time, so you know my time was precious. So I sit down with the students, and I say, okay, I'm happier here. I want to incorporate you. Let's figure out what's the best method for you to get the maximal return on investment. And there's two pathways to this, right, depending on essentially how much time they can pour in and how much energy they can pour in. And so the first pathway, right, is like Dr. Corbett, you know, I love research, I'm really into it, I love what you do. I can put 10 to 15 hours a week, you know, part-time into this, and I can really dive in. Those students, I say, perfect, there's no classes to teach you how to, at least yet, right, maybe in the future, how to come up to speed with my lab. So everybody starts at the same place. I don't care what major you are, doesn't matter, you have as much knowledge as the graduate students do, whether a PhD student or otherwise. So, in that case, if you're willing to put the dedication in, I can take you and you can lead a project yourself under my guidance. Let you run as fast as you can, and so we have students who do that, who lead these projects, who come in every day, they grow a sample, they scan them, they characterize them. We do this kind of feedback loop, and then the second pathway is, well, I only have maybe two hours a week, three hours a week, or something. I don't have a huge window, you know, for whatever reason. Perfect. I love it, because I've designed the lab and the structure of my group to able to slot a student in like that, perfect. So I'll pair them with a graduate student, and they then become second in command. They're not leading the project, and so a lot of times they'll be specialists in something, let's say X-ray diffraction, or maybe the AFM, and the graduate student will grow the samples, do primarily the characterization, and then they zone in and they do the special characterization, the diffraction or the microscopy, or whatever it happened to be, that way the student still gets a paper out of it, second or third author, depending, and they get a return on investments, and they can hold and show to graduate schools or their employers that this wasn't just them standing around the lab, they had real work they did, and they have a product at the end, where in the first track, right, they'll have a first author paper, they're the kind of the leader, and maybe even I pair undergraduates together. I have a good, strong student who's been in the lab a while this undergrad. I'll take a new undergrad, pair them up together too, and that can be the second for that too.

President Greg Crawford
That's fantastic when undergrads get out and graduate with a with the publication.

Perry Corbett
Oh, absolutely.

President Greg Crawford
Oh my gosh, it just, it sets them up, and you're right, return on investment, yeah, whether it's a graduate school or a job, and it impressed people that you know they were able to get published, and we love seeing that here at Miami.

Perry Corbett
Yeah, in Miami, the physics department has a really strong track record, it's something like 70% of all of our undergraduates leave with publications.

President Greg Crawford
That's amazing.

Perry Corbett
It's really unheard of, you know, a lot of times in the bigger schools, not bashing anybody or call anybody out, but you know, undergraduate incorporation is at a different pace. Yeah, right. It's not so intense here. We take our undergraduates and we really turn them into superstars. Yeah, I also, you know, we look at our engineering colleagues, right? A lot of them have mandatory internships, and I kind of think that in the physics department, the research is your mandatory internship. You know, that's where you're going to make, cut yourself above, you know, really show what your stripes are by going into the research lab. There, I really encourage everybody to do it. You know.

President Greg Crawford
You guys do a great job in physics with that, just fantastic. So, physicist, I think, and you know, being a physicist, and throughout my career, and just seeing how they teach, they've always been on the front end of things, you know, the demonstrations in the classroom, you know, right, how better to get students excited than to show them,

Perry Corbett
Yeah.

President Greg Crawford
The pure instruction, Eric Mazura, the famous physicist, who really did a lot with inquiring during the class to see if students were picking up the concept, and then if they didn't, he'd go back. If they did, he'd go forward. And then you, of course, have studio teaching, where laboratories are integrated right with a lecture, and you're doing both at the same time. It's kind of like superposition.

Perry Corbett
That's right.

President Greg Crawford
But tell us about your strategies, or some new things you're working on when you get in the classroom. What kind of things do you do?

Perry Corbett
I was trained in the scale up perspective. This is kind of like a flipped classroom, where you bring in demonstrations and you pair students up to have peer to peer learning, where you'll do an in-class problem and students tackle it as a team. I really like this kind of perspective. One, the students want to socialize, right? Let's use that energy to help them learn, and so a lot of times in my classes, what I do is I really emphasize that peer-to-peer teaching, and the other thing is, I like projects, so education is changing. My son goes to Miami, here, he's his freshman year, and when he was in high school, he showed me an app you could download, I have it on my phone, you could just take a picture of any physics problem, and it solves it for you, and so that's changed what homework means, right? Before our days, we would grind away at homework problems, right? You just grind and grind and grind, and now you take a picture of it. I can't control what the students do, so the evaluation of homework has changed for me. Right, it doesn't have the same weight that it used to when I went to school, and so instead of putting emphasis on a lot of homework, right? I instead put emphasis on projects, right, presentations, or you do something in the lab. I bring a lab demonstration in, they analyze real data that I took in my lab, teach them how to do that, so they leave with real job-ready skills, and then I evaluate it person to person, right, and I can see that, and then if they need to use AI, maybe they're saying, "Oh, well, you know, I don't quite have this written exactly right. You know, what are ways I can improve this set? What's a good synonym here, or something like that? They can still use all those tools to their best advantage, but then I can evaluate it and see, "Okay, you really understand how to process this data, you know what you're doing, your presentation crisp, clean, delivered well, you know. Where, if I just look at a stack of homeworks, I go, A, A, A, you know, that's that's a different meaning now.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, no, it's, it's changed, yeah, big time. That app is amazing, though.

Perry Corbett
I was like, you gotta be kidding me.

President Greg Crawford
I know it's just game changing.

Perry Corbett
I think it's helpful. I mean, yeah, to be honest with you, this is also a, you have to be honest with the students, right? They have to be honest with themselves. If I had a problem and I had to turn in my homework, right, and I was like, I don't have this last problem, you know, I would do it, I'd figure it out. You go to Chegg, you write it down, you turn it in. Now the honesty comes back, he goes, now I had to study this for the exam, exactly. Yeah, I got through this, I got through that little hurdle, whatever. Now I'm going to go back and I'm going to walk through this problem, really see how I get it, and I think the AI doesn't take away that process, because you still have to do it, that's on you, right? The AI actually helps you to go, oh, you know, I thought I had this, but there was a mistake here, and suddenly I caught that, and I didn't have a solved solution, and maybe if you didn't have that solved solution, you would have convinced yourself something that was false, so I actually think it's kind of these bumper lanes that are coming up that actually help guide you to the right answer a lot more than you know. You're like, I feel like this is right, I gotta wait for feedback two weeks when the professor or TA gives it, you know, hopefully they give enough feedback that I can find out where I'm wrong, not just minus two or something, you know. So I think these bumper lanes are actually going to be a positive for students.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, then first, so students that are leaving your laboratory and going off to the real world with this quantum background, apart from their physics acumen that they've learned with you, what are some of the other skill sets you think they got to take with them to get involved with this quantum industry?

Perry Corbett
So I think the most important skills are your soft skills, your humanity skills. Those are going to take you the furthest. The physics, the engineering, the computer science, the programming, that lays a very firm foundation for you to build. It makes you technically capable, but your ability to communicate, your ability to connect with people, your ability to present is very important for you going to the next level, and I think what I love about liberal arts is that we get all of that right. If we just only hamburger the technical skills, right, they would be really good. Maybe they make the best computer algorithms, right? But at the end of the day, you also have to go to your boss and say, this is what this program says, does, and can do for you. If you're not able to communicate that. Well, it just looks like code, you know. So, I encourage students to get involved in, you know, theater. I found theater to be very helpful. One, I am not scared to talk in, no matter how many people in a room. I love talking in front of big crowds, and theater helped me get over that hump. It also helped me to articulate my voice, speak loudly, things that are important for drawing an audience, and keeping, you know, maybe it's your business partners engaged or something. You know, if you're a scientist, you have to give out presentations. One of the big things you do is you go to a conference, you're going to present your data that you're going to have to show to the world. Literally, look at how beautiful this data is. Look at the problems I'm solving, I'm a winner here, and that comes from your presentation, your personal skills, not just the data on the screen.

President Greg Crawford
No, that's great. What excites you the most about where this field is headed, say the next 10 to 20 years, two decades, and what breakthroughs do you think we'll see that make you think this is why I do it?

Perry Corbett
Yeah, yeah, so what I'm really excited about in the quantum aspect is actually this ability I said a little bit ago is to see the unseen. Right now, some of this, the technology that's coming out of the Department of Defense is amazing. Right, there's something called ghost imaging, and the demonstrations for this are like they have a what is it, a sign that has some numbers on it? It's a whatever, 234, whatever, some test sign with some digits, and they put it behind a wall in a locked room that's completely dark. Okay, you can't see it, I can't see it. You take a normal photograph, even the highest resolution, best pixel camera, you can't see the sign, but with this special kind of ghost imaging entanglement techniques, you can take a few photons, just the weakest amount of light that could possibly exist, and then shoot that into that window and come back and reconstruct that whole sign. I mean, that's amazing, right? To be able to see at levels that you would be blinded otherwise. I think that those kinds of things really excite me, as being able to see things that we thought were impossible before, because then let's come back way to the beginning, right. There's then fundamental science questions I couldn't see into the material the same way, but now I have these new quantum tools. Can I probe deeper and see things we didn't even think were there? And then that may unlock a whole third quantum revolution, you know, that we get out of it. So I'm hopeful that our materials will expand and we'll be able to detect disease sooner. We'll be able to scan through, you know, the human body and go, you know, just like in those sci-fi movies. Oh, there's the tumor, and then you can send in photons that tunnel through you and then correct the tumor, and that sort of thing, and it's just gone, you know, instead of having to cut you, and then you know, like chemotherapy, and all that. I think those kinds of revolutions are going to happen, and it's going to be real exciting to see that.

President Greg Crawford
I think the one question I'd love to ask you, and then I have a funny one at the end, but you know, we hear the term thrown around quantum supremacy. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, and why does the US need to win this race.

Perry Corbett
Oh, this is an excellent question. And so there's really two kind of, to put it frank, right? These are kind of nuclear arms races, right? The last one was, who could get the bomb? Who could get the biggest bomb? The future of the world, whoever's going to be the dominant country is going to be who can get a real, working, fully commercialized quantum computer, because what was previously encrypted, what was previously impossible to solve, is now happens instantly. So, problems like, how do I deploy all of my soldiers on the field in the most optimal way to take over this target? A quantum computer can solve that instantly. Where a normal computer would say, why send 10 this way, and I change the parameters, send 10, this way, you kind of loop through all these possibilities that takes forever. A quantum computer would solve all possibilities at once, and so tactically things change, right? And then you try to send an encrypted bank message: I'm sending you a million dollars, you're sending me a million dollars, and suddenly somebody's listening, and they can break the encryption and get the money from us that changes our financial markets, right. Those kinds of things are going to be very important for maintaining national security. On the quantum sensing side, right, there's an example I love, and that's this is actually kind of old now. I think it's about 10 years old, and that's using quantum radar. So our stealth fighters today, they have cross sections that are like the size of an insect. Okay, so radar couldn't tell this from a bird, but if you use quantum radar, you can pinpoint that stealth bomber, so it really disrupts stealth tech. So a lot of things that we thought we were secure in now our adversaries can see very clearly. In communications, right? We come back to how do we send messages to the battlefield? How do we send messages to our allies, right, of troop movements or something, and keep that secure without anybody coming in and saying, oh, I know where everything's going. Quantum communications allows us to do that securely and know who's listening.

President Greg Crawford
It's a fascinating topic to think about. I do think the United States has got to lead. In this, and I think a lot more investment than we are today.

Perry Corbett
I actually think you know, you look at the global investment around the world, right? There are some of our adversaries, right, our near peers, they're making huge investments, huge investments, investments that actually blow us out of the water. But you look at all of our allies collectively, you know, the UK, Australia, collectively, I think we have this huge team that will will certainly win in the end. Yeah, you know,

President Greg Crawford
and we have a great partnership with the Cleveland Clinic that we just got started, and very state of Ohio, and the Cleveland Clinic, they invested more than 500 million into the quantum computing site up in the Cleveland Innovation District, and so I think Ohio is in a good position, and, and we're certainly right there with Cleveland Clinic to train the next generation of quantum coding and quantum scientists that can actually work in that world, and let's hopefully.

Perry Corbett
Yeah, that's really exciting.

President Greg Crawford
The Silicon Valley, or the Quantum Valley, can kind of show up there. Yeah, I like to say Cleveland,

Perry Corbett
We're the heartland of science.

President Greg Crawford
There you go, I love it. Yeah, so let's just end with a funny question. Yeah, absolutely. So, you must be a fan of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

Perry Corbett
I have watched the first, like, five or six seasons. Yes.

President Greg Crawford
Okay, so is there.. is there a character that you resonate with the most in The Big Bang Theory? Is there one that's like you?

Perry Corbett
Yeah, so in field of study, I'm probably the most like Leonard.

President Greg Crawford
Okay, like Leonard, okay.

Perry Corbett
Leonard works on the kind of same, or at least this character grabs from these same kind of problems, you know. I tend to think I have better social skills than all of them combined, but you know, yeah, the early seasons were fantastic. They would have this really well articulated humor that was like historical physics problems, you know. I thought it was amazing, you know,

President Greg Crawford
I always thought the connectivity to physics was so good and so accurate in terms of the topics and things that they did, even though it was very funny, right? But they really did get it right.

Perry Corbett
They did. There's a scene where Leonard and Sheldon are trying to get something up a stairwell, right, and Leonard was like, 'Ah, you know, it's something like this, so the force should be cut by a factor of two or something, and showed him like it's 45 degrees, it's absolutely a factor two or something, you know. So I thought that was really funny that they put these kind of specific jokes in there.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, it was a fantastic show. Well, Perry, this was a fantastic discussion that we had today. Thank you so much for stopping in and sharing your expertise in the quantum field is certainly very exciting, and I know how much effort you put into your students, and so sharing that excitement with them is going to really make the next generation of quantum scientists coming out of Miami. So, thank you very much.

Perry Corbett
No, thank you for taking the time to do this. And actually, I told the students I was coming to give a podcast with you, and they are ecstatic. So, we're going to get an influx of listeners, I think, from the lab and the students I have in electronics now.

President Greg Crawford
There's always extra credit to get them to listen to the show.

Perry Corbett
Yeah, that's a good, that's a great idea.

President Greg Crawford
Thanks for listening to this episode of In Such a Place from Miami University. Stay tuned for more great episodes with more great guests wherever podcasts are found.