Fireside chat features Duncan Earl of IonQ and Patrick Swingle of EPB
The two used to be colleagues at Qubitekk Inc., the start-up that Earl co-founded.
As teknovation.biz’s Assistant Editor Katelyn Biefeldt reported in another article, Chattanooga was front and center in many of the sessions during the inaugural Quantum Immersion Day: TN Edition held on Monday at the University of Tennessee (UT) Research Park.
We attended several of the sessions, including one billed as a fireside chat that featured Duncan Earl, a former researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Co-Founder of Qubitekk Inc., that IonQ acquired in November of 2024. Based in College Park, MD, but with offices around the globe, IonQ has experienced “explosive growth,” as one of its representatives said. The company joined UT, Knoxville (UTK), AI Tennessee, EPB Quantum, and Middle Tennessee State University Quantum in hosting the event.
Earl was joined by Patrick Swingle, Manager of Quantum Systems at EPB and a former Qubitekk employee, for the conversation.
Why the event in Knoxville?
One of IonQ’s goals is to expand its reach by expanding and connecting to ORNL and UTK, as well as the Nashville and Murfreesboro area.
Earl noted that the first challenge that had to be addressed was to determine “how you build a quantum network.” That was solved initially in Chattanooga and eventually in a few other communities. “The early networks are in place,” he added.
The follow-up question was, “What are you going to do with it? It’s a new tool. You need to have the best minds focused on applications.”
The final challenge is how to scale interconnected networks. “That allows you to do a scalable network of nodes,” Earl explained, adding, “What we want to do in Tennessee is (develop) the infrastructure.”
He credited KUB with following in the footsteps of EPB to build a fiber optic backbone.
Swingle said one of the big technical challenges is to combine quantum signals with those that our non-quantum.
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