Meet Professor Danna Freedman, the new Director of Quantum@MIT
Freedman: “We are the leaders in every area of quantum, and we are very well poised to integrate our efforts with end users to connect with applications.”
Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
As a PhD student studying single-molecule magnets in the early 2000s, Danna Freedman was procrastinating on writing her first paper when she stumbled upon a fundamental disconnect in her field.
“In that area, a lot of papers had an introduction that said that single-molecule magnets were useful for quantum computing,” Freedman recalled. “And I realized that to actually meet the goals of the introduction required an almost orthogonal set of design principles.”
Inspired by the idea of “design[ing] molecules and control[ing] their coherence properties,” Freedman began thinking about how to regulate the fundamental quantum properties of molecules instead of their macroscopic magnetic moments.
20 years later, Freedman, who is now the Frederick George Keyes Professor of Chemistry, is still at it, but her lab’s focus has shifted from molecule-based quantum computing to controlling the physical properties of a molecule by “tell[ing] atoms where to go,” particularly in fields like emergent materials, high-pressure materials discovery, and quantum information science. Her work has won accolades such as a MacArthur Fellowship and the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry. This August, it earned her the position of director of Quantum@MIT, a new Institute-wide initiative to accelerate quantum research.
A second quantum revolution
“One could make a case that MIT started the second quantum revolution,” Freedman said, referring to events ranging from physicist Richard Feynman’s 1981 MIT talk that envisioned a quantum computer to the development of the Quantum Adiabatic Algorithm and MIT Professor Peter Shor’s algorithm—an algorithm that uses quantum computers to prime factorize large numbers with unprecedented efficiency.
While a normal computer stores information in units called “bits”, which are either zeros or ones, a quantum computer works by storing information in quantum bits (“qubits”), where each unit contains a combination of zero and one known as a superposition.
“The most intuitive thing to a chemist,” Freedman explained, is to represent the qubits as nuclei. For example, a hydrogen atom’s nucleus can spin in a way that either aligns with or against the magnetic field of its environment. Quantum mechanics states that it’s only possible to estimate the probability that the nucleus is spinning a certain way, but forbids knowledge of the spin direction at a specific time. So scientists represent the nucleus’s spin direction as a superposition of the two possible spin directions. This is the principle behind nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which chemists use to ascertain the structure of a molecule.
In the 20th century, the guiding principle of the first quantum revolution was the realization that atoms are quantum particles and that the world is fundamentally quantum. Now, in the second quantum revolution, the goal is to harness these quantum properties to create better technology, according to the National Institute for Science and Technology.
While the “idealized form” of quantum computing is a “multi-decade problem,” Freedman believes that humanity will eventually have “fully functional quantum computers” that “impact the way that we think about computing fundamentally and change how we address challenges across a range of disciplines.”
In the meantime, Freedman predicts that many breakthroughs will come from research in quantum sensing, which detects changes in motion, electric fields, and magnetic fields on an atomic level. “Being able to harness quantum to understand the world around us beyond the specific features of quantum is a key area for the next five years of discovery,” she said.
Developing with the end product in mind
Just as Freedman guided her single-molecule magnet research toward quantum applications as a PhD student, her vision for Quantum@MIT is motivated by the problems quantum computing could help solve.
“We are the leaders in every area of quantum, and we are very well poised to integrate our efforts with end users to connect with applications,” Freedman said. She highlighted the broader potential applications of the second quantum revolution, such as “identifying a new quasiparticle” and “understanding a biological problem that has stymied researchers.”
“A lot of quantum is comprised of what are fundamentally tools: quantum computers, quantum sensors, quantum networks,” Freedman explained. “These are valuable and complicated systems, but none of them exist without a challenge [to solve].”
To better identify these challenges, Freedman is focused on broadening her definition of “quantum stakeholders” to include people who will use these new algorithms, hardware, sensors, and computers. By connecting quantum researchers to future quantum users, she hopes to “define our field and move it forward.”
“I think that there is a lot of hope pinned on quantum in a lot of different areas,” Professor Freedman said. By leading Quantum@MIT, she is working to “be a good steward of this field,” enabling the MIT community to “meet the promise of quantum.”
The Tech would like to thank Michał Lipiec ’28 for fact-checking content within this article.
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