Quantum’s Incremental Arrival

“Rather than waking up one day and seeing all these things appear all of a sudden, you’ll wake up one day and realize they’ve been here for a while,” Gold says, “and that they’ve slowly gotten to the point where now they can start to do things that are novel and useful.”

A PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Gold studies privacy, security, and information processing in quantum systems from a theoretical perspective. He came to theory after several years of experimental work on ultracold atoms, where gases get chilled to expose their quantum behavior. Having now gone through multiple cycles of UChicago’s Quantum Science, Networking, and Communications course, where a different professor teaches each of the eight weeks, drawing on their own quantum research, Gold serves as the connective link for students across all of them. Together, the faculty represents some of the field’s leading researchers in quantum information and networking, drawn from UChicago and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The role has given him an informed sense of what students arrive expecting and what they end up leaving with.

One thing they’re looking for, Gold says, is some clarification of the strangeness. “A lot of them come in wanting to understand what’s so wacky about all of this,” he says, “which is exactly where the course starts.”

The course runs eight weeks online, with twice-weekly live sessions paired with self-paced material. The first weeks build out the mathematical toolbox of quantum states, measurements, and the linear algebra needed to track how those systems evolve. By the middle of the course, students are programming in Qiskit, IBM’s quantum software, designing circuits, implementing canonical algorithms, and running their first simulations of quantum key distribution (QKD). From there, the curriculum moves into communication protocols, hardware, and a multi-node network exercise in SeQUeNCe, a tool developed at Argonne National Laboratory and UChicago that lets researchers model quantum networks before the hardware to support them arrives at scale. Both institutions are part of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, the consortium that manages the course and brings together much of the region’s quantum research infrastructure.

Gold underlines how the course’s progression moves from theory to simulation. While the mathematical framework gets presented first, it’s often with the simulations that the real strangeness of the quantum world starts to make sense. “Sometimes the ideal approach for people isn’t just sitting down and writing out all the math,” Gold says. “Having Qiskit and these simulation tools is really nice because you can start to ask questions and play around with things.”

“It’s not that the simulation replaces the math,” he adds. “It’s that it opens up an alternative entry point so students with different backgrounds and strengths can find their way in.”

And, in fact, students in the course come from a wider range of backgrounds than the subject matter might suggest. That includes software engineers, systems engineers, finance and banking professionals, as well as math PhD students. For some, the course is an initial step toward a master’s program in quantum or a related field. Others come because their companies are exploring a quantum project and need someone fluent enough to evaluate it or even work on it directly. What all students share by the end is a grounded sense of what quantum can do now and what it might do soon.

It’s the latter that’s so important, Gold says. By establishing a realistic grounding, the course demystifies the technology. Students leave with a working sense of the tasks quantum systems already perform, like QKD and the teleportation of quantum information across a network. They also see what the popular framing tends to miss, which is that quantum systems don’t replace classical ones but combine with them. A QKD protocol, for instance, still runs on classical communication channels, while the measurement results from entangled photons still travel over classical networks and get processed by classical computers before becoming usable keys.

Gold thinks the variety of student backgrounds is part of why the course works. A finance professional, a systems engineer, and a math PhD student will come at the same problem from three different directions, with each angle opening up something the others might have missed. “You get a variety of different ways to start a problem,” Gold says. “Other students see that people think about things differently.” Quantum is a field where different starting points produce different intuitions, and the course makes that visible.

For Gold, the real takeaway is a clearer picture of a field that’s often described in extremes. “It’s really kind of like a slow burn,” he says. “Things improve incrementally.” What that means in practice is that the field’s tools keep getting better until one day someone realizes a problem that was out of reach a few years ago can now be solved. For students who want to be there when those gains accumulate, the Quantum Science, Networking, and Communications course, offered by the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, offers a way in.