Michelle Simmons, The Physicist Behind Australia’s First Quantum Computing Company

The Australian physicist who worked out how to build electronic devices one atom at a time, made the world’s smallest transistor that way, and then founded Australia’s first quantum computing company to sell what her laboratory had learned. Michelle Simmons is the Australian physicist who worked out how to build electronic devices one atom at a time, and then founded Australia’s first quantum computing company to take the method to market. She is Scientia Professor of physics at UNSW Sydney, director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, and founder and chief executive of Silicon Quantum Computing. Her laboratory made the first transistor whose working part is a single phosphorus atom placed on purpose rather than found by luck. It has since built wires four atoms wide, qubits and a two-qubit gate by the same method. The method is easy to describe. Carrying it out is another matter. A clean silicon surface is coated with a single layer of hydrogen, and the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope then lifts individual hydrogen atoms away in a chosen pattern. Phosphine gas is admitted so that phosphorus bonds only where the silicon is bare, and…