Taking a bird's-eye view as PRX Quantum’s new lead editor

For a quantum physicist, Robin Blume-Kohout’s journey began in an unlikely place: the remote Alaskan bush, where he grew up.

“The men I looked up to would tinker with chainsaws and snowmobiles,” recalls Blume-Kohout. “But I was a bookish kid, and I always felt that if I could understand the basic principles, there could be less swearing and kicking of the machinery.”

When Blume-Kohout headed off to college, he explored physics, early computer programming, and statistical inferencing. In 2019, he founded the Quantum Performance Laboratory at Sandia National Laboratories, where he serves as co-director.

Blume-Kohout’s research in what he calls “quantum schmantum” is explorative, yet realistic. Specializing in quantum characterization, verification, and validation, he says he gets to “play with everybody’s quantum computing hardware,” and figure out how it works, or why it doesn’t.

“It feels like being Sherlock Holmes and a physicist, which is pretty fun,” he says.

Explorative yet realistic is also how Blume-Kohout approaches his editorial work. “My research forces me to try and understand the whole darn thing, from soup to nuts,” he says. “I hope that is an advantage for my work at PRX Quantum.”

Blume-Kohout has served on PRX Quantum’s editorial board since the journal’s launch in 2020, and was recently appointed as the journal’s lead editor. Over his summer home’s satellite Wi-Fi in Alaska’s backcountry, APS News sat down with Blume-Kohout to discuss his background, vision for keeping the journal "1% better," and the upcoming trends and structural challenges facing the quantum community.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What was the spark that got you into physics?

When I was nine, I got a 1985 Almanac of Science for Christmas. It was a digest of the latest year in scientific discovery, and I read that voraciously. I didn't understand a damn thing, but for whatever reason, the physics and the math sections — about solving the monster group and preliminary discoveries of charm and strange quarks — just sounded so cool.

How did that early interest develop into a career?

When I went off to college, I was going to major in computer science. It was only after I arrived to campus that I found out that Kenyon College didn't have a computer science program. My faculty advisor, Ben Schumacher, suggested that in lieu of computer science courses, I might be entertained by his sophomore physics course and a medieval literature course. That was where my career started — I ended up double majoring in physics and English.

It turns out that Ben was the person who invented the word “qubit.” He did some of the seminal work in quantum information science.

What kind of work do you do now at Sandia's Quantum Performance Laboratory?

I focus on quantum characterization, verification, and validation, or QCVV. We do characterization of quantum computing devices — understanding what they’re actually capable of doing, and understanding why that might be different from what they're supposed to be doing. We also do benchmarking — trying to understand, quantitatively, how close to ideal performance the device is operating at.

Would you describe yourself as a “realist” keeping the quantum computing dreamers grounded?

There is tremendous ambition and optimism in quantum research. There is also tremendous hype, and even B.S. It’s important to have strong voices that are realistic and actively critical, but it's also important to have visionary, ambitious voices. Our field survives — every field survives — on the dialectic between those perspectives.

We see this at PRX Quantum. We want to be a journal that represents the quantum information science community, but we want to represent it at its best. We periodically see fads or surges of excitement, and it's challenging to try and make a judgment about whether it’s all hype or the next great idea.

Are there trends you’re keeping an eye on?

I'm optimistic about quantum algorithms that are suitable for fault-tolerant quantum computers. We have not yet seen a blowtorch of directed excitement for quantum algorithms, and I would be excited to see that, because I think we are over the hump on the hardware side.

The open question is, what will we do with a quantum computer once we build it? I'm hoping that we see a surge of brilliant, transformative papers in quantum algorithms and applications over the next few years, because that's what we need. The hardware, I think, is going to be in the bag.

As the new lead editor, what is your vision for PRX Quantum?

Figuring out how we can get 1% better. When we decide which papers to publish, it's a huge collaboration. [It’s] similar to building a quantum computer — we bring together all these subsystems, so no one person or subsystem has to work perfectly all the time. That's the brilliance of fault tolerance. Authors make mistakes, referees make mistakes, editors make mistakes. But we can team together to get a little better each year.

What’s a big challenge facing the field right now?

The price of entry for leading-edge quantum computing hardware development. Companies like IBM, Quantinuum, and Google emerged and exploded into relevance, and raced past what academic labs were doing. And they’re writing great papers; we see their papers in PRX Quantum. But we also need professors and graduate students and postdocs doing cutting-edge quantum experimental research, because people at companies are not creating new graduate students.

If you could meet with every prospective author for PRX Quantum, what would you say to them?

I would ask how they think we should resolve the tension between the ambition of representing the whole community in an egalitarian way and showcasing the very “best” papers. One of our biggest tensions is desk rejection. I know authors can get confused, and I would love to make them part of the solution.

I would also urge them to work hard on starting their paper with a clear, lucid description for a fairly broad audience. I see too many papers where the research is great, but they end up not making the cut because they weren't clear enough to a broad audience.

When you’re not working on research or editorial leadership, what do you do for fun?

I like to travel with my daughter, who just graduated from high school. We’ve traveled to Europe, South America, and Asia together. Travel hacking and collecting frequent flyer miles has been a hobby of mine for about 15 years, and so when we travel, I try to use miles to fly us somewhere interesting.