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“The IBM Quantum Experience will make it easier for researchers and the scientific community to accelerate innovations in the quantum field, and help discover new applications for this technology,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director at IBM Research in May, when the company announced public access, via the cloud, to its 5 qubit processor.

One retired IBM scientist took this statement as a call to action. Christophe Rossel, who spent 27 years at IBM’s Zurich lab, is now the president of the European Physics Society (EPS), which is partly responsible for inspiring and building up a new generation of scientists across Europe.

“When I heard about the IBM Quantum Experience I knew that it would be a great opportunity to introduce some of Europe’s best and brightest to the promise of the quantum world,” said Rossel. “In a matter of weeks we pulled together an agenda and sent out an invite to our EPS Young Minds members and we were overwhelmed with registrations.”

A few weeks ago IBM’s Zurich lab hosted the nearly two dozen physics students from the top scientific institutions in Switzerland, including ETH Zurich, Paul Scherrer Institute, EPFL, University of Bern and the University of Basel.

After an introduction to the quantum world, IBM scientists Stefan Filipp, Andreas Fuhrer, Ivano Tavernelli, Gian Salis and Nikolaj Moll, put the students to work with a series of experiments designed to leverage the 5 qubit IBM Quantum Experience system. The teams got acquainted with the quantum composer, the graphical user interface for programming the qubits, and writing their own quantum algorithms, before presenting their results (see video).

“We prepared for the students several very challenging exercises which they quickly grasped, despite lacking a background in quantum mechanics, said Moll. “A few teams worked on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, whereas other teams worked on the more ambitious application side, as for example the Grover search algorithm or simulating the hydrogen molecule. It was impressive to see.”

Since the event ended Rossel has received some very positive comments from the students:

“I especially appreciated the varied design of the day as well as the elaborately made tutorials. Also the lectures in the morning were very helpful for the understanding, especially the technical when one comes from a completely different area,” said Sacha Schwarz, University of Bern.

Students present results and feedback from their #quantumexperience today at IBM Research in Zurich pic.twitter.com/qoSGaJaS9P — IBM Research (@IBMResearch) November 21, 2016

“Again thank you for this visit which was really exciting and led by passionate researchers. If other visits are possible, we would be pleased to participate,” said Bruno Rigal, EPFL.

Moll adds, “If we want to reach 50 qubits in the next few years we don’t have a second to spare, but clearly without building up a quantum ecosystem in advance we won’t have any users for such a system. So both research and community building need to be done in parallel, it’s not either/or, it’s both.”