UNSW offers Bachelor of Quantum Engineering degree
The University of New South Wales (UNSW) has opened applications for a term 3 entrance into a new Bachelor of Quantum Engineering degree.
For students not satisfied with a single degree, the university is also offering it in a double degree alongside a Bachelor of Advanced Science.
The university said students will study nanoelectronics, microwave engineering, and quantum technologies for advanced sensors, secure communications and computing.
The four-year degree covers a range of computer science, mathematics, electrical engineering, and unsurprisingly, physics and quantum mechanics topics throughout the course.
"As it stands, there simply aren't enough qualified engineers to fill the jobs needing quantum skills in Australia -- or anywhere in the world, in fact," said UNSW Scientia professor Andrea Morello. "Quantum engineering is the microelectronic and microwave engineering of the 21st century."
"Developing and applying the cutting-edge technologies in these fields demands a deep understanding of their quantum nature. Moreover, this understanding can also be used to develop devices and capabilities that have no precedent, like quantum computers and quantum secure telecommunications."
UNSW is the home to the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communications Technology, which is racing to become the first to develop a sufficiently powerful quantum computer that would change computing as we know it.
On Tuesday, the UNSW team said it had increased the coherence time of a spin-orbit quantum bit in silicon to around 10 milliseconds, which allows the preservation of fragile quantum information for longer.
"Spin-orbit qubits have been investigated for over a decade as an option to scale up the number of qubits in a quantum computer, as they are easy to manipulate and couple over long distances. However, they have always shown very limited coherence times, far too short for quantum technologies," the centre said.
In April, the UNSW quantum team announced they had developed hot quantum bits which operate at 1.5 Kelvin, around 15 times higher than other chip-based quantum systems.
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