Convergence Accelerator Phase I: Project Scoping Workshop (PSW) on Quantum Interconnects (QuIC)

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This workshop will be organized in Fall 2019 and will bring together key stakeholders from academia and industry. The participants will discuss current challenges in Quantum Interconnects (QuIC), opportunities to overcome those challenges, and will map out a path forward to enable near-term progress. The specific aim of the workshop is to identify realistic deliverables in the area of Quantum Interconnects, including: i) Prototypes that could be developed in the next 2-5 years, and ii) Testbeds needed to evaluate them in the following 5 years.We propose to organize the workshop that will bring together key stakeholders from academia, industry and government with the charge to answer the following questions: What is the societal impact offered by QuIC technology? Who will benefit from our work? What are the most promising QuIC platforms and how soon can they to be translated from lab to "real world" environments? What are the main experimental and theoretical challenges of these QuIC platforms, and how we can address them? Do they pose interesting scientific or engineering questions that require convergent research and partnership between academia, industry and government? Are there needs for platform specific or generalized algorithm and software development? What are the needs of QuIC community in terms of sustained financial support, additional technical expertise required, workforce/ student training, etc? To answer these questions and evaluate the potential of QuIC, the workshop will draw participation from different scientific and engineering disciplines including material scientists, physicists, electronic and photonic circuit designers, control and information theory experts, computer scientists, software engineers, and so on.The workshop will involve key players from both industry and academia involved in the development of classical interconnects (largely optical) crucial to the development high performance computing (HPC) systems and modern data centers. Importantly, this project advances the objectives of two of Ten Big Ideas for Future NSF Investments: "Quantum Leap" (QL) and "Growing Convergent Research" (GCR). This activity also advances objectives of the National Quantum Initiative (NQI), a coordinated multiagency program to support research and training in Quantum Information Science (QIS). The outcome of the workshop will be a white paper co-authored by all workshop participants and made available to the public. The white paper will outline the Workshop's position regarding community priorities relative to QuIC.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.