The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 (37 page)

That snapshot suggests the supernova that led to this star's formation was very different to supernovae seen today.

‘It's completely unique in the sense that supernovae should emit large amounts of iron and various other materials. But this particular supernova evidently didn't release any iron; it released a little bit of magnesium and quite a bit of carbon,' says Keller.

From this, researchers were able to deduce that this first supernova was a relatively low-energy explosion that led to the formation of a black hole. ‘The primordial star's supernova explosion was of surprisingly low energy,' says Keller. ‘Although sufficient to disintegrate the primordial star, almost all of the heavy elements such as iron were consumed by a black hole that formed at the heart of the explosion.' This led to the low level of iron found in the star.

The research team is now collecting data from large telescopes in Chile to build up a more detailed picture of the star in the hope this will reveal more about the universe's first generation of stars.

High-tech treasure hunt

Life, the universe and Boolardy

The quantum spinmeister:
Professor Andrea Morello

Stephen Pincock

It's 10 o'clock on a steamy summer's night when Andrea Morello hits the stage of a small bar in the hip Sydney district of Surry Hills. There's a tropical sunset painted on the wall and plastic vines draped over the bar. So many people have crammed into this over-stuffed room that there is barely space to stand, let alone sit. If there's a fire, we're in trouble.

The crowd is here for a monthly event called ‘Nerd Nite', where scientists talk about their research to a young and enthusiastic audience. (As the website says, ‘It's like the Discovery Channel – with beer.')

Tonight the mob has already cheered talks about the Higgs boson and the molecular anatomy of bacterial flagella from a couple of sharp and funny young science guns. Now the compere introduces Morello, an associate professor in quantum nanosystems at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, based at UNSW Australia.

Six-foot-something and greyhound thin, Morello, aged 41, wears his long wiry hair pulled back into a luxuriant ponytail. There's a soul patch under his lower lip and a dangerous twinkle
in his eye. And you can forget about the usual young-scientist's uniform of faded T-shirt and jeans. This researcher is dressed for impact in a pair of skin-tight burgundy pants, pointy black shoes and a snowy white shirt with origami pleats and a kind of vampire collar.

Over the past couple of years, Morello and his colleagues have emerged as frontrunners in a scientific race to build a computer that harnesses quantum physics, the laws that govern the physical world at the smallest scale. Their hope and expectation is that such a machine will one day solve problems beyond the capacity of regular computers. With their extraordinary characteristics, quantum computers promise a step change when it comes to solving computing problems, especially those to do with ‘optimisation'. The classic example is that of the travelling salesman. With dozens of stores on his beat, what route will deliver the best efficiency in terms of time and distance travelled? Optimisation problems like this crop up in applications as varied as stock market trading, medical treatments, scheduling airlines and designing drugs. A classical computer has to crunch through each option sequentially to find the answer. A quantum computer promises to do it simultaneously. In hope of paving the way to a quantum computing world, Google and NASA have teamed up to buy a D-Wave quantum computer, while chemists at Harvard University hope the same computer will help them find the most energetically stable way to fold a protein chain, an aid to designing new drugs.

But companies such as D-Wave have got where they are on the back of experimental technology that has raised many a cynical eyebrow. By contrast Morello and his colleagues, Andrew Dzurak and Michelle Simmons, have captured the international limelight by providing a proof of concept that such a machine could be built using the material that forms the basis for every computer you've ever owned – the good old silicon chip.

For his ‘intellectual leadership in developing the silicon components to make quantum computing possible', Morello received the prestigious Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year, awarded by the Prime Minister at a black-tie event in Canberra in October 2013.

For anyone who gives credence to the tired stereotype of scientists and engineers as unimaginative plodders and pocket protector-wearing, unworldly, antisocial geeks, Morello offers a startling corrective. Uncompromising, charming, and intellectually rigorous, he's a demon in the lab
and
on the dance floor.

He's also a willing and entertaining science communicator, with a facility for charming explanations of the quantum world. Tonight, he wants to convince his audience that quantum physics is not as mysterious as people describe it. ‘Every time I go to a cocktail bar, this is the conversation I have,' he says with a knowing smile. ‘So this talk is just my usual pick-up line, which I'm going to regurgitate for you.'

For the following 15 minutes or so, he's got the overheated audience in the palm of his hand. As he talks, he gestures in front of him, as if massaging the concepts of quantum physics out of the thick summer air. And indeed Morello in full flight has the ability to make you believe you're starting to comprehend the complexities of the quantum world, if only for a moment.

He calls two volunteers up to help him with a demonstration of the mysterious phenomenon of ‘entanglement'. It's the word quantum physicists use to describe the fact that the characteristics of two quantum particles can become inextricably linked, so that if you measure a property of one, the other will instantly be found to have a value that correlates, no matter how far apart they are.

He flirts and cajoles as he hands ‘Bruce' a piece of paper and two pens, one red, one blue. He also hands ‘Angela' a coin and asks her to flip it.

If it's heads, Bruce's job is to take the blue pen and write +1 on the left and −1 on the right of the paper, or the reverse if it's tails. Angela repeats the coin-toss. Bruce is told to turn the paper over and follow the same instruction, this time writing the numbers using the red pen. Lastly he is told to cut the paper in half. Bruce keeps one side; Angela takes the other. They each have a piece of paper with either +1 or −1 written in blue on one side and +1 or −1 written in red on the other. They seal their pieces of paper in envelopes and send them out into the crowd. When a guy in the audience opens the first one, he calls out that it's a +1 written in blue. This means, of course, that the other envelope must contain a piece of paper with a −1 in blue on it.

‘We say that the cards are “classically” correlated,' explains Morello. ‘Angela and Bruce could go to their homes and at midnight Bruce could check his paper and instantly know what blue number Angela has on her paper.' Nothing surprising here, he says, as Bruce already knew that the correlation was there.

But in the quantum world, this isn't the case, he explains. In entangled quantum systems the numbers are not ‘pre-written' on the paper: they only ‘appear' when you perform a quantum measurement. And the outcome of the measurement depends on which side of the paper you decide to look at.

In other words, if the pieces of paper were quantummechanically entangled, when Angela and Bruce went home, the numbers that appear on Angela's paper would actually depend on which side of his paper Bruce had decided to read.

And so the audience gets an inkling of the weirdness of quantum entanglement.

Albert Einstein famously dismissed it as ‘spooky action at a distance', but Morello tells us that scores of experiments have shown that this really is the way quantum particles work.

In fact, entanglement is the basis for the very chemical bonds that hold the molecules of our own bodies together, he says before
reaching for a sip of beer.

‘It's just the way the world works, so suck it up, OK? If you think this stuff is weird, then you're weird.'

* * * * *

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.