Visit by the king and Macron to quantum lab UvA surrounded by demonstrators
France and the Netherlands want to expand their cooperation in the field of quantum technology. To this end, French President Emmanuel Macron and King Willem-Alexander visited the quantum lab at the Science Park on Wednesday morning. Two protesters were detained.
The arrival of the king and Macron at the Science Park was disrupted by two protesters shouting French slogans. Chanting the protest song “On est là,” they stormed toward the president. Despite the presence of many security guards at the scene, one of the protesters managed to get within 10 meters of the party. Unperturbed, the king and Macron shook hands with Mayor Femke Halsema and College President Geert ten Dam, while the scandalizing protesters were wrestled to the ground by security guards.
It is not the first time protesters have disrupted a state visit by the French president. During a lecture in The Hague on the future of Europe, the president was also interrupted by activists.
The reason for the visit to the quantum lab is French-Dutch cooperation in the field of quantum technology. “Deep tech was on the program and our lab turned out to be suitable for that,” Professor Florian Schreck head of the Quantum Gases & Quantum Information research group told me. He received the request from the French embassy to host the French president in his mailbox just under three weeks ago.
“A total surprise,” Schreck said. The next Monday, 35 men from the French embassy showed up on his doorstep. “It’s incredible how many people are working on this, planning every minute of the visit. You experience an event like this once in a lifetime.” Incidentally, the king and Macron were very interested listeners, according to Schreck. “Macron in particular really looked at you and listened attentively. They also asked just the right questions. It was not so much a lecture, but really a conversation.”
Crash course in quantum technology
Together with UvA professor Phillippe Bouyer, Schreck gave the king and Macron a crash course in quantum technology using four setups in the quantum lab. The starting point was a laser setup that cools atoms to extremely low temperatures. The atoms then barely move and form a cloud of ultracold atoms in a vacuum held in place by lasers, a so-called magneto-optical-trap.
“The magneto-optical-trap forms the basis for all quantum mechanical experiments with ultracold atoms,” Schreck explained. The magneto-optical trap was explained by physicist Claude Cohen-Tannoudji’s research group, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1997. That research took place at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) research institute in Paris, where Schreck and Bouyer also studied.
Schreck then ushered the visitors into a room with two giant machines. The first one turns ultracold atoms into the world’s first perpetual atomic laser, an invention described by UvA researchers in a publication in the journal Nature. Such an atomic laser can be used for ultra-precise measuring devices, such as clocks and GPS, to make measurements in space and underground.
The other machine is the quantum computer, built within Quantum Delta Netherlands (QDNL), a partnership of research institutions and companies. Each loose, ultracold atom represents a quantum bit or qubit. Unlike a computer’s classical bits, which calculate with zeros and ones, a quantum bit can occupy any possible value between zero and one. As a result, the quantum computer can compute very different things than the normal computer.
Entangled qubits
The quantum bits are also the gift the UvA offered to the king and Macron. Both received a glass ball containing a golden arrow, the representation of the quantum bit, manufactured by the science faculty’s Technology Center. A similar model was previously used for teaching students.
Should the king and Macron press a button simultaneously, the arrows would rotate around in the sphere in exactly opposite directions. That process depicts the entanglement of two quantum bits that can be used to encrypt and transmit information. “So the king and Macron can always use their own encrypted quantum communication channel,” Schreck explains. “That’s a joke, of course. It doesn’t work for these spheres, but the technology already exists.”
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The message Schreck wants to convey to the king and Macron is that quantum cooperation between the Netherlands and France can be made even more concrete by building quantum sensor networks between the two countries. “Then we can compare our clocks exactly with the clocks in Paris, among other things.”
Protesters
After a roundtable discussion with CEOs, scientists, and investors on the importance of deep tech in the European ecosystem and a photo opportunity, the king departed. Meanwhile, students had gathered to catch a glimpse of the king and Macron in front of the windows and outside.
On the balustrades of the University Sports Center, several groups of students from the Amsterdam Autonomous Coalition, the Red, and the Activist Party UvA were protesting. “We are standing here in solidarity with the French workers,” said Carlos van Eck on behalf of the Activist Party UvA. “There are huge strikes in France because of pension reforms. Macron is coming here on a state visit to the Netherlands to escape it, and we want to prevent that.”
