Puzzles, Games & History Create Quantum Education
Overview
Postdoc researcher Joel Hutchinson discusses quantum materials and innovative science communication with host Veronica Combs in this episode of The Quantum Spin by HKA. Joel is an experimentalist at the University of Basel who specializes in 2D quantum materials. He is also a science communicator who helped to build the “Save the Cat’” quantum quest, a game that incorporates physics puzzles as well as history lessons in scientific discovery. He and host Veronica Combs cover the Hubbard Model as well as the power of games to level the educational playing field.
00:00 Introduction to Season Four
00:29 Interview with Joel Hutchinson: Exploring 2D Quantum Materials
02:00 Global Quantum Communities: A Comparative Insight
04:33 Save the Cat: A Quantum Quest
13:08 The Future of Quantum Computing
20:55 Advice for Aspiring Quantum Researchers
21:33 Conclusion and Podcast Information
Joel Hutchinson is a Canadian postdoctoral researcher at the University of Basel working on the theory of two-dimensional quantum materials. He earned his PhD from the University of Alberta in 2019 and has since conducted research on quantum technologies in France and Switzerland. His work focuses on applications of spin-orbit coupling, superconductivity, and strongly-correlated electrons. He is a passionate science communicator and educator and has delivered a TEDx talk on the holographic principle. When he’s not busy with science he finds other avenues of exploration; last year he published a novella and rode his bike 4000km across Western Europe.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Veronica Combs: Hello, I’m Veronica Combs, and this is the Quantum Spin by HKA. For season four, we decided to do something a little different. In March, we attended the APS Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California. We took advantage of this amazing event to talk to the leaders in academia, industry, as well as the creative folks who helped make the event such a compelling experience. I hope you enjoy these conversations that really reflect what’s happening in the industry right now. Today I’m talking with Joel Hutchinson, who is a postdoc researcher at the University of Basel. Thanks for joining me today, Joel.
[00:00:35] Joel Hutchinson: Thank you so much, Veronica. It’s great to be here.
[00:00:37] Veronica Combs: 2D quantum materials is your specialty, right? What are you doing at the University of Basel?
[00:00:42] Joel Hutchinson: Yeah, so I’m a theoretical physicist. And one of the luxuries of being a theorist is that you’re not tied to a particular laboratory setup. So that means we can explore a really broad range of topics, and that’s good because the diversity of phenomenon in quantum materials is incredibly enormous.
[00:00:57] In general, if I had to encapsulate it, I would say, people who study quantum materials are quantum physicists who really wanna see quantum coherent phenomena on a bigger scale, meaning, a single electron or a single photon, those are definitely quantum objects. You need quantum mechanics to describe any of their properties.
[00:01:16] But there are some situations where, you know, something as big as something you can hold in your hand behaves in a fundamentally quantum way. A superconductor, for example, or one could argue even a piece of metal is really a quantum object, something where you have trillions and trillions of electrons.
[00:01:31] So that’s our goal at all times is to find these cases where quantum becomes bigger.
[00:01:36] Veronica Combs: I always think of theorists as more the explorers. How do you think about being a theorist?
[00:01:41] Joel Hutchinson: Yeah, exactly. It’s incredible. You just, you get to sit down and come up with these wild ideas
[00:01:46] That you really hope correspond to something that’s actually real. But you’re free to explore, really, construct models tailored to specific materials or construct models that give interesting physics and then hope that. Some material is found where it’s produced.
[00:02:00] Veronica Combs: So you’ve studied in Canada, in France, and in Switzerland. I always like to ask folks on the podcast how those quantum communities are different or similar, in each country. There’s so much good work going on around the world that I’m always curious to hear about individual communities.
[00:02:14] Joel Hutchinson: I think Canada in some ways is very lucky because we got into the quantum game so early. I believe Canada had the first quantum computing company, D-Wave was founded in 1999. And I remember that’s a company very closely tied to the University of Alberta, where I studied for many years.
[00:02:32] And I remember them taking off in grad school when quantum startups weren’t really a thing. There’s also this Quantum Valley around Waterloo. The University of British Columbia has a Quantum Matter Institute. I’m from Alberta and I’ve seen just even in the last few years, all these different initiatives.
[00:02:47] There’s Quantum Alberta Network. There’s something called Quantum Horizons Alberta, which is a $25 million initiative. So it’s really exciting to see what happens there. Of course, I live in Europe now. I lived in Basel for the last three and a half years. And the scene is really blooming there.
[00:03:03] In France my time there was cut short by Covid, so I haven’t seen so much of what happens, but in Switzerland it’s very impressive. It’s this really microscopic country, but the research that’s being done there is really incredible. And I’ve had an interesting vantage point because my supervisor, Jelena Klinovaja is a member of this national consortium of researchers.
[00:03:21] It’s called NCCR Spin. At its core, it’s focused on spin qubits and semiconductors, but there’s research done in all areas of quantum technology. I don’t have a stake in the game because I don’t work so much with spin qubits, but I’ve had the opportunity to follow the evolution of this community and see what’s going on.
[00:03:38] And also on the industrial side as well. There’s been quite a few new startups in Switzerland, but I think at the end of the day, the difference between these countries is not so important. I remember a few months ago I went to an event hosted by QAI Ventures. That’s a quantum incubator located in Basel, and Basel’s not a big city.
[00:03:55] There’s like 200 thousand people and I’ve never once met another Canadian there, but actually at this incubator, one of the people going through the incubator actually went to my high school
[00:04:05] Veronica Combs: in Canada. Oh my gosh. What are the chances? That’s amazing. Yeah.
[00:04:08] Joel Hutchinson: So the point is that if you are in quantum, quantum is a tightly connected ecosystem.
[00:04:12] Veronica Combs: Yes, I talked to the CEO of Quantum Basel yesterday, it seems such a great investment in the future to build all that, to put that investment into Basel with the supporting the entrepreneurs and industry and research and just really, looking forward and understanding that it’s a long-term investment that you have to put the work in now to build a better future.
[00:04:29] Joel Hutchinson: Yeah, absolutely. It’s constructing an entire future in some sense.
[00:04:33] Veronica Combs: I know that you are here at the event for a variety of reasons, but one thing that you’ve worked on is the Save the Cat experiment. It seems like such an interesting part of the event. Tell me how that event, how that works.
[00:04:44] Joel Hutchinson: Oh, yeah. I’ve had so much fun working on this project. Marie Le Dantec is an incredible artist and a science communicator. And this idea by Marilena has been something really fun to pursue. So basically, yeah we designed a quantum quest, which is happening as we speak. So the United Nations designated 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.
[00:05:04] And to honor this centennial birthday of Schrodinger’s equation, what we have is a mission to save Schrodinger’s cat, basically. It starts by time traveling back to 1925. You find this cat named Spinny and he’s hiding because Schrodinger wants to put him in a box and he doesn’t want to get stuck in this super position for the rest of his life.
[00:05:25] So your mission is to bring spinny back to 2025, and you do this by traveling through the history of quantum physics, solving puzzles and riddles as you go. It’s also partially a scavenger hunt that takes place throughout the APS global meeting venue. Yeah, it’s been one of my favorite outreach type challenges.
[00:05:43] I think it’s really important to have good storytelling whenever you’re doing science communication. And so I’m super happy that the team valued this in the game design. But the goal at the end of the day, what our goal was not really to teach quantum physics. The target audience is specifically APS members, most of which have some at least undergraduate level of quantum mechanics.
[00:06:02] But when, at least when I learned quantum mechanics in university, I didn’t learn anything about the history at all. And I think there’s some pedagogical reasons for this. It’s not the simplest approach to learning quantum mechanics because the development of any science is really messy.
[00:06:17] So it’s not the simplest, but it’s also what makes the subject so rich because it’s a human endeavor. And all of these personalities that appeared throughout the history of quantum physics have really interesting and fascinating stories. So I think everyone who plays the game will learn a bit about quantum physics.
[00:06:35] But more importantly, I think they’ll gain an appreciation for the process in the history that allowed us to get to where we are today with this technology and this science.
[00:06:45] Veronica Combs: Yes, that is a very cool combination of a little bit of adventure, but also the history and also the science.
[00:06:50] That does sound, that sounds amazing. We have a client at HKA who studies superconductors and is a very accomplished scientist in the field, and he was telling us about a new paper he’d written, and he always starts back in 1917. And he always gives us a history lesson every time we talk to him.
[00:07:08] It was very helpful to see that long arc of the science and the Nobel Prizes along the way. And first they discovered it and then they figured out how, what to do with it. And I did really appreciate that history lesson ’cause like you said, you don’t always get that, that long-term perspective, but it tells you so much.
[00:07:23] Joel Hutchinson: Yeah, exactly. As a student you’re given this science as if it was handed down from above. And it’s been known for eternity. But it’s always surprising to me just how recently many of these discoveries have been made and how new we are to probing this science.
[00:07:36] Veronica Combs: Exactly.
[00:07:37] So is the Save the Cat experience, are you done in an hour or the scavenger hunt lasts all week? How does that dynamic work?
[00:07:44] Joel Hutchinson: Yeah, it lasts the entire week.
[00:07:45] Veronica Combs: Oh.
[00:07:46] Joel Hutchinson: Basically you can play individually or join as a team. Individually, I think it’s a big challenge. There’s roughly 25 different puzzles to solve.
[00:07:54] Veronica Combs: Oh, wow.
[00:07:54] Joel Hutchinson: I think our record so far for team finishing was maybe three hours. But the larger the team, the faster it goes.
[00:08:02] Veronica Combs: I was really tempted to join myself, but then I thought, wow, those physics puzzles. Yeah, that would take me three months or maybe three years to figure all that out. No I
[00:08:09] Joel Hutchinson: highly encourage it. You don’t actually need to solve the puzzles in any particular order. So you can just click on one, see if it’s interesting, and make an attempt.
[00:08:17] Veronica Combs: Oh, excellent, excellent. We always talk about science communication on the podcast and one thing that really struck me about this Save the Cat experience is that it is more interactive and hands-on, and it has that gaming experience to it. Do you see more of those kind of experiences, participatory experiences becoming part of science education in general, when I think about my son, he would much rather do that my 16-year-old than he’d rather do something participatory than just read a book or listen to a lecture.
[00:08:48] Joel Hutchinson: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a difficult question. It’s one I think we need to think a lot about. For Save the Cats, we haven’t taken any user data, so we don’t have statistics on the demographics, but I can certainly say from the people that I’ve seen come to the booth that the average age is certainly below 30.
[00:09:04] And I think that’s not a coincidence. I’m a millennial. I grew up enjoying games of all kinds, and I still do. I received a puzzle solving board game for Christmas, and I’m still, devoted weekends to trying to solve this thing. But, and I think that comes a lot particularly for apps like this because, you know, our generation grew up experimenting with technology in a very playful way.
[00:09:28] My gut reaction is that anything that gets you more involved in the learning process is going to make it stick better in the end. That being said, we have to be a little careful about over gamification, right? There’s reward centers in the brain that get activated when you’re pressing buttons and you get these congratulatory flashy messages.
[00:09:47] And I think as long as we’re not impeding someone’s own creativity then it’s an incredibly useful tool. Because, games remove the hierarchy. Professors and students are playing at the same level when they join this game. And specifically for quantum there’s so many cool possibilities.
[00:10:03] I think in this area. Qubits are such great natural game components. In one of our Save the Cat puzzles you actually travel back to an APS meeting in 1940 and you meet Felix Bloch who Oh, wow. Who the bloch sphere is named after. And he’s trying to get an encoded love letter to his future wife.
[00:10:25] And you need to decode this by applying single qubit gate operations to, to a qubit. So I think qubits and gates themselves are to me, they’re like very playful things that you can start to develop games around. A lot of the outreach that I observe really tries to force art into science or science into art.
[00:10:44] And it can look unnatural. So anytime you have a good fit, I think you should try to exploit it. And, this whole process of designing this game has really gotten me thinking about alternative ways to introduce quantum computing specifically for the Gen Z and even younger generations.
[00:11:01] Because every outreach talk that I’ve been to for quantum computing, it starts the same way, which is, here’s a classical bit, it can be a zero or a one, here’s a quantum bit. It can be a superposition of both. But it makes you think, if you’re talking to a really young audience, their familiarity with the classical bit is just as foreign as a quantum bit and that actually opens up some interesting opportunities because it’s a blank slate, right? So I really wonder if qubits are such playful things that maybe people can become familiar with them at a very young age.
[00:11:32] Veronica Combs: That’s a really good point. Whenever I think about delivering a message I think about where to start, what’s the first thing you have to explain?
[00:11:38] But yeah, you’re right. Sometimes you do have to start with what is a classical bit, because people just know that their laptops and their phones work. They don’t think about ones or zeros necessarily. So when you’re putting together a message, what do you start with the audience or do you start with the message or the topic or how do you think about explaining these complex ideas to folks?
[00:11:56] Joel Hutchinson: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So, when I was a grad student, I was really lucky to get an opportunity to deliver a TEDx talk. And at that time I was working in a completely different area of physics. It was string theory and cosmology. Really abstract, really esoteric stuff. These TEDx talks are very carefully honed.
[00:12:16] You have coaches that try to get the style exactly right. And one piece of advice that came my way was to make a talk that means everything to someone, but also something to everyone. Meaning that, it’s good to have a specific target audience in mind, like embody that in a person, but also make sure that everyone attending gets something out of it.
[00:12:37] And I think that’s true for education, teaching and scientific outreach in general. And it only works if you have the feedback though. There has to be some kind of dialogue going back and forth to make sure that you’re on the right track for the people that you are communicating to.
[00:12:53] The audience is so important in any of these kinds of outreach opportunities.
[00:12:58] Veronica Combs: Right. Yeah. And it’s hard, communicating complex ideas is hard and you do have to put it together carefully and then revise as needed, as you mentioned, based on your feedback.
[00:13:07] Exactly. What, as a researcher, looking at the industry, the commercial side of things, are there any areas or projects that you’re tracking?
[00:13:17] Joel Hutchinson: On my research side of things, one of the beauties of working as a theorist in quantum materials is that you have the luxury of, with a very open mind, looking deep into the future to see what kinds of possible quantum devices or technologies could emerge.
[00:13:31] And that means you can really get creative with the materials involved. And in particular, my, my focus is on 2D materials and the structures, by stacking them into layers that we can produce. And that’s a very interesting area and particularly right now because it allows you to start engineering the electronic phases that you’re interested in just by stacking like Legos, different materials on top of each other such that the different layers inherit each other’s properties and things like this. So yesterday I actually presented some work we did on this which was a proposal for a Cooper pair splitter. In this case it’s a sandwich of three different materials.
[00:14:10] That’s superconducting, but the superconducting pairs are split across the entire sandwich. And it’s one of these really naive ideas that surprisingly worked. The usefulness is that superconductors are abundant sources of entangled electrons. And, wouldn’t it be cool if we can harvest those electrons and do something with them. So that’s what I think about in terms of research. That’s not a five-year device concept. That’s a far-reaching high-risk kind of technological idea. But I get to have fun with those kinds of things in my job.
[00:14:41] At the same time I’m looking around at what’s happening in industry in the near term. And, I would say, there’s so much diversity and so much variety in approaches to quantum computing right now, and that’s an amazing thing. As someone recently asked me, what the physical definition of a qubit is?
[00:14:57] And there is none, right? Because the thing is, the world is fundamentally quantum at a small enough scale and low enough temperatures everything is quantum. And that means that what qubit is made of actually looks completely different depending on your approach and the context.
[00:15:12] Basically you just need a two level system that can be initialized, read out, and manipulated, and that’s a very broad definition. So I think it’s important to keep an open mind and think about all of these different potential avenues equally. It’s tempting to think of this kind of as a horse race and the first one to a universal quantum computer wins.
[00:15:33] But I think that there is value in most of these approaches in the near term. IBM has like a thousand physical qubits. Google’s crossed a critical error threshold. Cold atoms have this advantage of all to all coupling. Everything has some kind of advantage that, that, that’s worth pursuing.
[00:15:50] I think quantum computing technology becomes economically relevant long before we reach genuine quantum supremacy, right? If a quantum computer provides a good solution. In a reasonable amount of time. It doesn’t matter if some designated computer scientists can find a better classical algorithm, a year later.
[00:16:09] It’s not such a relevant question, I think, to me. That being said when I look around at the industry right now there are some things that I keep in mind. So we can’t ignore the fact that the entire. Industry of modern computers is built on silicon, and we have this enormous and highly honed infrastructure for semiconductor fabrication.
[00:16:30] And it makes sense to utilize that if we want to produce qubits at scale. The approach of topological quantum computing is highly dubious at this point. Don’t get me wrong, I can totally envision a world a hundred years from now where all of our quantum computers are topological , from what I’ve seen the current evidence for Mims is not so convincing. And I don’t know many people who are convinced. But we’ll see how things evolve.
[00:16:54] Veronica Combs: Yes. Yes. It’s such a good point about the different modalities. And again, as a communicator, you do have to start with what is quantum computing?
[00:17:03] But then some of the news over the last six months has catapulted it into, you don’t have to say why it’s important. Now people are like, okay, we get it. Or, the media at least. So I’ve been trying to introduce the idea of modalities, right? You see the chandelier or the superconducting design, that’s become the default image.
[00:17:19] And as communicators, we’ve tried to expand that vision, right? It’s not just superconducting, it’s neutral atoms, cold atoms, trapped ions. It adds a layer of complexity, but it certainly deepens your understanding to know all the different modalities and what their strengths are, because they’re different. They’re not all the same.
[00:17:34] Joel Hutchinson: Yeah, absolutely. What does a quantum computer look like? The answer is completely different depending on the modality and it makes it a little more complicated to understand, but it also makes it much more rich, I think.
[00:17:45] Veronica Combs: Yes.
[00:17:45] Definitely. Yeah. I hope we’re not at the horse race stage of the discussion yet, or trying to keep it as broad as we can for as long as we can. If you had a quantum computer that was fault tolerant enough to explore interesting topics, is there a 2D material you would like to know more about? Or what would you do with a fault tolerant quantum computer?
[00:18:04] Joel Hutchinson: Of course. I’m a quantum materials person, and it’s a funny position because you’re equally well suited to be a designer of quantum computers as you are to be a customer.
[00:18:14] Because we wanna understand how these materials work. So what I would do actually, is I would solve the Hubbard Model. The Hubbard Model is a toy model that we use to describe quantum materials. It’s incredibly simple. Every ion in your material has one orbital . Electrons can hop from one orbital to its neighbor.
[00:18:34] But the complexity of that problem immediately becomes enormous because even with just one atom, there are four possible states that can have no electrons. It can have a spin up electron, a spin down electron, or it can have two electrons. The complexity grows exponentially if you have two atoms.
[00:18:49] Now suddenly you have 16 possible states, if you have three, it’s 64. And so the best supercomputers today can exactly solve this problem for maybe 20 or 30 atoms, and that’s a long way away from a real material which has 10 to the power of 24 atoms. So this model is actually an entire industry of research.
[00:19:10] There’s all kinds of approximation schemes that have been devised to try to tease solutions out of it, but many of these are uncontrolled and in most parameter regimes, the results are still debated. So it would be amazing to just have a solution for this for a relatively reasonable model.
[00:19:27] It’s really a quantum problem and therefore it fits very well onto a quantum computer. I don’t think by any means that’s the full story cause it is really a toy model. It makes this one enormous assumption, which is that electrons only interact with each other when they sit on the same atom.
[00:19:43] And that’s not true in reality, electrons are little charges. They repel each other at long distances. And so actually a lot of the work that I’ve done at University of Basel has been to understand the role of these longer range interactions in deciding what kind of quantum phase emerges in the material. But at the same time, we need to end a lot of debates by solving a Hubbard Model on a larger system.
[00:20:06] Veronica Combs: And I think when you, when I’m talking with the media and they say what is this thing that they’ve solved? And you say it’s a toy problem, it’s easy to dismiss, but I think you have to start with those kind of problems, so you know what to do with the more complex ones. Is that the case?
[00:20:21] Joel Hutchinson: Yeah, exactly. We know that this model corresponds very well to experiments in some cases. I highly doubt it corresponds to experiments in all cases. I think there are some situations where it really will fall off the map. But we have to know what works and what doesn’t work basically.
[00:20:37] Veronica Combs: And I think one thing that is also hard to grasp is quantum computers will help us understand quantum computers better in terms of simulating quantum computers. Exactly. When you say that, you think, does that work? But that’s another part of the adventure and the learning process.
[00:20:50] Joel Hutchinson: Absolutely. Yeah. We’re in this funny position of using quantum to learn quantum, it’s a feedback loop.
[00:20:55] Veronica Combs: Do you have any advice for technology people interested in joining the quantum industry or students starting their education in physics?
[00:21:03] Joel Hutchinson: Yeah. I think for students there are so many more learning opportunities than there were when I was first studying. Even online without a formal education, there are all kinds of tutorials that will, even allow you to start playing with qubits basically on a real quantum computer.
[00:21:21] And yeah, the resources now are really incredible in this field. If you’re interested, just follow your curiosity. The formal education is essential, but make use of all these additional resources.
[00:21:32] Veronica Combs: Great. Thank you so much for your time today. It’s great to hear about your work and your perspective on science communication.
[00:21:38] Thanks so much.
[00:21:38] Joel Hutchinson: Thank you so much, Veronica.
Host Veronica Combs is a quantum tech editor, writer and PR professional. She manages public relations for quantum computing and tech clients as an account manager with HKA Marketing Communications, the #1 agency in quantum tech PR. You can find them on X, formerly known as Twitter, @HKA_PR. Veronica joined HKA from TechRepublic, where she was a senior writer. She has covered technology, healthcare and business strategy for more than 10 years. If you’d like to be on the podcast yourself, you can reach her on LinkedIn, Veronica Combs, or you can go to the HKA website and share your suggestion via the Contact Us page.
June 6, 2025
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