Creating a ‘quantum silicon valley’ in Sussex: Prof Winfried Hensinger talks about team accidentally breaking world record while working towards ‘technology revolution’

Prof Winfried Hensinger, who is also chairman and co-founder of Universal Quantum, spoke to this newspaper at this year’s Mid Sussex STEM Challenge.

The event took place at the South of England Showground in Ardingly on Friday, July 4.

Prof Hensinger said: “In greater Brighton we’re actually making really big steps towards the realisation of real quantum computers and quantum sensors.”

He said: “Just a couple of weeks ago we made a big breakthrough as a spillover from quantum computing. We managed to break the world record in achieving the most sensitive way to measure tiny electric fields using the technology we developed for quantum computers.”

Prof Hensinger said it could be possible to measure very small electric fields, maybe from the human brain or body, which could help with the treatment of mental health and brain conditions.

He said: “So you could understand, for example, processes in your brain by correlating sensations with the electrical signals that are being emitted.”

He continued: “We managed to break this world record by orders of magnitude and this was just an accident in developing our quantum computers.”

Prof Hensinger said his research group started at the University of Sussex more than 20 years ago when quantum computers were thought of as borderline fantasy. The basic idea behind them is that they take advantage of the principles of quantum mechanics and quantum phenomena (like entanglement and superposition) and use ‘qubits’ to perform complex calculations.

Prof Hensinger said: “Quantum computers are machines that can solve really important problems. For example they could help is create new pharmaceuticals in a fraction of the time. So nowadays it might take ten years and a billion pounds developing a new drug. A quantum computer might help us to make this in a much shorter time. Maybe a few years rather than ten years and at a fraction of the cost.”

He added: “At Sussex we managed to beat the world record that was held by Oxford University and then Duke University by seven orders of magnitude in sending a qubit between different quantum computing modules. This is a really, really important thing when you want to build quantum computers with sufficient computational powers with sufficiently many qubits to tackle some of the really important industry problems.”

Prof Hensinger said quantum computers have the potential to change the way people work and live, calling them a ‘technology revolution very similar to the emergence of the first computers’. But this could be a revolution where new machines tackle problems that ‘even the fastest computers just couldn’t even get close to solving’.

Prof Hensinger's team is trying to create ‘a whole quantum silicon valley in greater Brighton’ with a national quantum computing facility and infrastructure in Mid Sussex.

He said: “People could use quantum computing for their respective application. So, for example, we (Universal Quantum) work with rolls Royce to develop aircraft engines that use much less energy and we work with pharmaceutical companies and with financial companies. All industry sectors really have critical applications in quantum computing.”

He continued: “When I finished my PhD people were talking about quantum computers. This was around 25 years ago and people then thought this was impossible, way too complicated. The very pristine quantum phenomena that you would need to control would be destroyed way too easily and there would just be no way to build such a machine.”

But Prof Hensinger said that whenever people tell him something cannot be done he sets out to prove them wrong. He said: “So I travelled the world – actually two and a half times around the world – visited lots of different research labs trying to understand what would be the best technology that would allow us to actually build such a machine. And at the people rolled their eyes at me and said you’re never going to do that that's never going to happen, all these millions of reasons why this can't work.”

He said that when his research group started at Sussex University they had very little money and the students had to build everything themselves. He said: “We had to really make things work in a way you wouldn't believe. And we made some really big breakthroughs and then suddenly people started to think ‘wow this really could be done’. In 2013 I helped create the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme.”

He said this big government investment has ‘accelerated’ the UK to one world’s quantum computing leaders. He said: “I’ve been invited to the White House, the German parliament and lots of countries who want to imitate what we have achieved here in the UK.”

Universal Quantum was founded in 2018. Prof Hensinger said his passion for physics comes from being fascinated with Star Trek and Q in the James Bond movies as a child. He hopes his appearances at the Mid Sussex STEM Challenge show young people that ‘boring school physics’ can have ‘a really profound application’ in the real world and potentially result in them having a career building ‘mind blowing technology’.