by Ashley Hay
* * * * *
The day before his Nerd Nite performance, Morello pulled up Google Maps on his office computer to show me the village in northern Italy where he grew up, a tiny place of 3000 souls called Cumiana, right at the foot of the Alps.
As he virtually navigated through the streets of the town he gave me a potted history: the only child of a factory worker and a schoolteacher, he was someone who enjoyed school, excelling in Italian grammar and literature, music and history. ‘It sounds arrogant to say, but I effortlessly got top marks in everything.’
Science wasn’t a big part of life until high school, and even then his practical-minded parents guided him towards electrical engineering, a discipline where he could get a job straight after graduation.
Meanwhile his intellectual horizons expanded as he developed a passion for avant-garde jazz and Nietzsche. ‘That had a very big impact on me. It made me in a sense quite cruel and unforgiving. Nietzsche opened my eyes to all sorts of petty excuses that people make for themselves to be mediocre. Nietzsche helped me make a point of stepping beyond that. I was a very cocky teenager back in those days. Very, very cocky.’
He landed a place in the prestigious electrical engineering department at the Polytechnic University of Torino, where standards were high and the student attrition rate brutal. Of the 900 students who enrolled in his year, only 100 graduated five years later. He survived, and was drawn to physics courses that introduced him to the fundamentals of the physical world – quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, superconductivity.
‘I did all that and I reeeallly liked it,’ he says, the word stretched out emphatically.
After hours, Morello was finding he also liked what you might call an alternative lifestyle. He started visiting jazz clubs in town and hanging out with squatters who had taken over the city’s abandoned public buildings. ‘There was always something going on, there were concerts and movie nights and all sorts of activities taking place.’
A teacher at the university, Renato Gonnelli, had a contact at a famed magnetic field laboratory in Grenoble, France, where Morello went to complete his final-year thesis. In a reference letter he wrote some years later, Gonnelli praised his former student’s ‘great experimental ability’ and his ‘uncommon facility in quickly learning new topics’.
For the young lad from a small country town, the Grenoble lab was an inspiring place, with Nobel laureates dropping by to use the world-class facilities. And from there he made further connections that led him to the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory, a leading ultra-low-temperature lab at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where he worked with Jos de Jongh, a formal and rigorous professor of magnetism with impeccable status in his field. ‘He’s the one who insisted that I go to the very roots of any problem I was interested in.’
Next, Morello moved to the University of British Columbia at the invitation of the eminent theorist Philip Stamp, where he developed a theory of the quantum dynamics of electron spin. ‘That’s where I got to the deepest realms of quantum mechanics. He fed and nurtured my interest in the foundations of quantum physics.’ Like Gonnelli, Stamp was impressed by Morello’s passion for learning, and his creativity, self-confidence and ambition. ‘It’s hard to say whether he plays harder or works harder, but he does both pretty hard,’ Stamp told me.
These larger-than-life figures were giving Morello an idea of what it takes to be a productive scientist. ‘What they taught me was to persevere in the research you believe is important and interesting and be very thorough at it,’ he says. ‘If I look at the spectrum of scientists I’ve interacted with, the ones who have left the biggest imprint on the way I do science now are the ones who will take one problem and just get to the bottom of it.’
* * * * *
In 2006, Morello took the biggest gamble of his career, deciding to join the team at the University of New South Wales at the invitation of Professor Andrew Dzurak, to try and build the components of a quantum computer.
‘When I came here, it was a very courageous decision,’ he says. ‘There was a perception that this was a project that was interesting, exciting, challenging, but it might be on the far side of what can be done.’
So far, things could hardly have gone more swimmingly in terms of the group’s work. Dzurak says Morello’s ability to combine hands-on experimental physics with an extremely good grasp of theory has been crucial to their success. ‘He’s a very rigorous physicist both theoretically and experimentally.’ Clearly they make for a formidable team. Since 2010, there have been three publications in Nature. And in 2011 they were awarded the prestigious Australian Eureka prize for scientific research.
The computer they are trying to build may be constructed using silicon chips not dissimilar from those in a conventional computer. But the quantum computer will process information in an utterly different way.
In normal so-called digital computers, the basic units of information, called bits, are built from tiny transistors that can exist in two states, either a 0 or a 1, depending on whether current is passing through them.
But at the quantum scale, cut and dried notions such as 0 or 1 no longer apply. Down at the level of the fundamental particles that make up matter, objects become more like the ‘shapeshifters’ of science fiction, existing in a combination of all their different possible states at the same time. Scientists refer to this phenomenon as ‘superposition’. And for decades, they have theorised about the possibilities. If they could build computers from these shapeshifter quantum systems, then each ‘quantum bit’ – or ‘qubit’ – of information, could, in essence, be both a 0 and a 1 simultaneously. When you combine this with the phenomenon of ‘entanglement’ that Morello demonstrated via the bits of paper to his audience that night in Sydney, the arithmetic of computing is transformed.
There are really no shortcuts to understanding quantum computing, Morello admits. But in essence its power comes down to the mind-boggling amount of information that quantum bits contain because of superposition. For example, with three standard computing bits, it is possible to specify eight different numbers. 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110 and 111 represent the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 respectively.
With three qubits, there are also the same eight ‘basic states’ you could write with three classical bits. But because the qubits are shapeshifters, all eight numbers are also present at the same time. By the time you get to 300 qubits, you have a vast computational capacity. ‘To describe the quantum state of 300 fully entangled qubits you need an amount of classical information equivalent to 2300, which is as many atoms as there are in the universe.’
Good luck understanding the details. But what is relatively easy to grasp is that the crunching power promised by a quantum computer is a leap ahead of that offered by a classical computer.
There’s a lot of promise. But constructing useful qubits in the real world is a major headache. Among the many challenges is the fact that quantum particles tend to be very susceptible to interference: if they interact with their environment, the quantum state is destroyed.
Yet over the past ten years or so, researchers around the world have managed to build qubits in a multitude of ways. Some have suspended ions in vacuums, others have used photons of light or impurities in diamond crystals and others, like the D-Wave, have used switching currents in a superconductor.
Morello, Dzurak and their colleagues create their qubits by embedding phosphorus atoms into the crystal structure of silicon. They have shown that they can detect the magnetic orientation (or ‘spin’) of the phosphorus atom and of a single electron orbiting the atom’s nucleus. It’s this characteristic, the spin, that serves as the qubit.
Morello’s lab at UNSW makes for a stark scene change from the steamy tropic-themed Surry Hills bar. With high ceilings, large windows, and clusters of high-powered machinery around the place, it’s a light, spacious no-nonsense room. Morello and a couple of his students are going to show me how the qubit works. First, they chill the
silicon and its single phosphorus atom to nearly absolute zero. This is vital because at higher temperatures, the spin of the particle will change spontaneously.
By pulsing microwave radiation along electrodes in a tiny circuit laid down on the chip, they can change the spin. When its spin is measured as being ‘up’, an electrical current can flow along the circuit and when it is ‘down’, the current stops flowing. On a computer screen, the output of this is displayed as a sine wave oscillating up and down as the microwaves push the spin from up to down and back again. The top of the wave represents a qubit readout of ‘1’, while the bottom of the wave is ‘0’.
The fact that the system is also reading intermediate points along the graph between zero and one shows the phenomenon of superposition in action, says Morello. Each measurement is either zero or one but it is possible to represent the quantum shapeshifters by repeating each measurement hundreds of times and counting the frequency with which a 0 or a 1 is measured.
In many ways, the team is running behind its competitors. For instance, researchers using other approaches to making qubits, such as charged atomic particles confined in electromagnetic fields or the D-Wave, have already managed to entangle the behaviours of numerous qubits. By contrast Morello and colleagues have only managed to produce a single qubit. But Morello says their hardware offers better prospects for scaling up to larger machines containing more qubits because silicon can be purified of its magnetic contaminants, eliminating any magnetic noise that destroys the delicate quantum states of the spin qubits.
Morello’s game is to perfect the building block, then race ahead to large-scale automated production. ‘The silicon route to the quantum computer has several advantages. It offers the best protection of quantum states of any solid-state system, and the fabrication technology we use is the same as what’s used to make normal, existing computers. The industrial infrastructure to build the devices is already there; we don’t need to create a new industry,’ Morello says.
Within the next few years, their plan is to build a small-scale quantum computer made up of ten qubits that would demonstrate all the basic components necessary for a bigger quantum computer. ‘We could start testing the performance of each part and how they behave when we put them all together. From the point of view of computational capacity, they might also start to be useful to simulate some simple molecules, or the behaviour of materials in which the electrons interact in a complicated way.’
* * * * *
On the personal front, things have also gone well for Morello since moving to Sydney. Not long after he arrived in the city in 2006, he was dancing at a gay nightclub on Sydney’s Oxford Street when he met the jazz pianist and writer, Carolyn Shine.
‘When I said I was a quantum physicist her eyes lit up and she was like “seriously, let’s stay in touch,” she was totally fascinated.’ Shine and Morello became friends, and she introduced him to the Sydney music scene, where he has come to feel at home. (Shine passed away from cancer in 2012.)
These days, when he isn’t in the lab or wrestling equations at home he’s just as likely to be at a nightclub, supporting his girlfriend Lindsay Rose (also known as Rita Fontaine or Johnny Castrati), a well-regarded cabaret and burlesque performer.
Morello says the communities of burlesque performers, jazz musicians and scientists share many attributes. Partly that’s because the arts and sciences are both intrinsically creative. But mostly it’s to do with the importance of curiosity, and of giving yourself totally to your passion.
‘It’s about connections and interactions,’ he says. ‘These are all special communities of people who are curious, outgoing and creative, with the courage to express “the real you” and to follow through.’
Pitch fever
Life, the universe and Boolardy
Here be dragons
Vanessa Hill
In early January 2014, the CSIRO received a letter from Sophie, a seven-year-old girl. All she wanted was a dragon.
Hello Lovely Scientist [she wrote], My name is Sophie and I am 7 years old. My dad told me about the scientists at the CSIRO. Would it be possible if you can make a dragon for me? I would like it if you could but if you can’t thats fine. I would call it Toothless if it was a girl and if it is a boy I would name it Stuart. I would keep it in my special green grass area where there are lots of space. I would feed it raw fish and I would put a collar on it. If it got hurt I would bandage it if it hurt himself. I would play with it every weekend when there is no school. Love from Sophie.
‘Our work has never ventured into dragons of the mythical, fire-breathing variety. And for this, Australia, we are sorry,’ we replied.
Sophie’s letter, and our response, made an unexpected splash across the globe. It was featured on Time, the Huffington Post, the Independent, Yahoo – the list goes on. People contacted us offering to help; financial institutions tweeted their support, and DreamWorks Studios phoned (seriously), saying they knew how to train dragons and wanted to speak with Sophie.
The dreams of one little girl went viral.
We couldn’t sit here and do nothing. After all, we’d promised Sophie we would look into it.
So on 10 January 2014, at 9.32 a.m. (AEDT), a dragon was born – Toothless, a blue female dragon. Her species? Seadragonus giganticus maximus.
Generated in titanium via 3D-printing, Toothless came into the world at Lab 22, our additive manufacturing facility in Melbourne. The scientists there have printed some extraordinary things in the past – huge anatomically correct insects, biomedical implants and aerospace parts. So they thought a dragon was achievable.
‘Being that electron beams were used to 3D-print her, we are certainly glad she didn’t come out breathing them … instead of fire,’ said Chad Henry, our additive manufacturing operations manager. ‘Titanium is super strong and lightweight, so Toothless will be a very capable flyer.’
Sophie’s mother said Sophie was overjoyed with our response and has been telling everyone dragon breath can be a new fuel. ‘All her friends are now saying they want to be [scientists] and Sophie says she now wants to work at CSIRO. She’s saying Australian scientists can do anything,’ she told the Canberra Times.
We’d love to have you in our team, Sophie. For now, stay curious.
Uniquely human
The quantum spinmeister
Advisory panel
Professor Merlin Crossley is Dean of Science at the University of New South Wales. He studied at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar) and has carried out research on genetic diseases at Oxford, Harvard, Sydney and UNSW. He serves on the Trust of the Australian Museum, the Boards of the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, the Australian Science Media Centre, and New South Innovations. He is an enthusiastic science communicator.
Professor Suzanne Miller, CEO and Director of the Queensland Museum Network, is a geologist with particular interest in promoting engagement with science and culture through collections and museum participation. An affiliate professor at the University of Adelaide, she has held previous roles at the South Australian Museum, National Museums Scotland, British Antarctic Survey, various universities and the BBC. She has authored more than 50 scholarly papers and articles and presented more than 100 invited addresses on Earth and planetary sciences and lifelong learning.
Professor Fred Watson has been astronomer-in-charge of the Australian Astronomical Observatory since 1995, but is best known for his radio and TV broadcasts, books and other outreach programs including science tourism. Fred is a musician, too, with both a science-themed CD and an award-winning libretto to his name. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2010. Fred has an asteroid named after him (5691 Fredwatson), but says that if it hits Earth, it won’t be his fault.
Acknowledgments
Ian Lowe’s foreword grew from his keynote address to the 2014 Australian Science Communicators Conference. A shorter version was published on The Conversation
14.
Ludwig Leichhardt’s Australian journals spanning 1842–1844 are held in the Mitchell Library, Sydney. They were translated and edited by Thomas A Darragh and Roderick A Fensham and published for the first time as part of the Memoirs of the Queensland Museum in 2013.
‘Survival in the city’ by Nicky Phillips was originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 27 April 2013.
‘Planet of the vines’ by William Laurance appeared in New Scientist, 5 October 2013: © 2014 Reed Business Information – UK. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
‘Is there room for organics?’ by James Mitchell Crow was first published in Cosmos, February 2014.
‘This. Here. Now. The climate catastrophe’ by John Cook was published in Anne Summers Reports, issue 5, December 2013.
‘Weather and mind games’ by Tom Griffiths was published in Griffith Review 41: Now We Are Ten.
‘Weathering the storm’ by Peter Meredith was published in Australian Geographic, July 2013.
‘Firefront’ by Ian Gibbins was published in The Inflectionist Review, 2014 (2)
‘Antarctic ice: Going, going …’ by Nerilie Abram was commissioned for A Curious Country, edited by Leigh Dayton for the Office of the Chief Scientist, 2013.
‘They’re taking over! The jellyfish move in’ by Tim Flannery was published in the New York Review of Books on 26 September 2013.
‘From Alzheimer’s to zebrafish’ by Michael Lardelli was first published in e-Science Magazine, Faculty of Science, University of Adelaide, July 2013.
‘Joseph Jukes’ epiphanies’ by Iain McCalman is extracted from his book The Reef: A passionate history (Viking/Penguin, 2013).
‘Popular mechanics’ by Gareth Dickson was published in the White Review
