Blending two worlds: a quantum researcher’s story of science and culture

During my undergraduate studies at the Institute of Physics, University of São Paulo (USP), I initially considered becoming an astrophysicist. This stemmed from my high school experience with an outstanding physics and math teacher, a Peruvian immigrant, sparked my interest in physics with his well-prepared blackboard explanations and patient guidance through concepts and formulas.

However, at the beginning of my third year, everything changed. I had my first contact with quantum physics in an introductory course taught by Prof. Sylvio Canuto (former Vice President for Research at USP and current President of the Brazilian Physical Society). It was my first exposure to quantum mechanics, and I finally learned about wave-particle duality, tunneling, the “zombie cat of the scientist with the hard-to-pronounce name” (Schrödinger’s cat), and how Nature can play dice.

At the end of one of his lectures, he put a challenging question to us: "Schrödinger's equation has no explicit dependence on temperature. How would you include its effect?". I thought that this was a great question. It made me realize that by combining quantum mechanics, which doesn't account for temperature, with statistical mechanics —a discipline that deals with the relationship between heat and matter at microscopic level —we might be able to describe the real world more accurately. I was fascinated by the idea and this passion connected me to my lifelong research subject: applying various field like quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics and computational simulation to solve practical problems.

After my Ph.D. graduation and years of working as a researcher at top-ranked Japanese universities, I began seeking opportunities to develop new quantum computer applications for chemistry and material science. Fujitsu, in collaboration with RIKEN and other partners, established an industry-academia consortium to develops the Japanese quantum computer. At that time, the consortium had just announced the 64-qubit superconducting quantum computer (now we already have 256-qubit!). From that moment, I knew Fujitsu Research was the place to go if I wanted to work on the quantum computer project.

Since joining the company, I have been focusing on two main tasks. First, I work with partners from other Japanese companies interested in developing and using quantum technology to solve their own problems related to chemistry, material science or drug discovery. Quantum computing has just been born, so it is important to work with other companies to understand the specific problems they are facing and how we can best utilize quantum technology to fit their needs, particularly if we want to provide a robust and useful hybrid quantum computing platform (a platform enables optimal quantum computing by linking superconducting quantum computer and quantum simulator) for partners and customers in the near future.

Titles, numerical values, and proper nouns in this document are those reported when this interview was made.