Microscopic particle could improve Sydney commute

An atom suspended by magnetic forces inside a Sydney University lab could revolutionise the city’s transport network, the NSW government hopes. The microscopic particle is “trapped” inside the most powerful computer in the southern hemisphere, a multimillion-dollar quantum machine paid for in part by the United States Department of Defence.

“The process could potentially untangle, in minutes, complex traffic, crowding or scheduling problems on Sydney’s transport network that would currently take days,” said Q-CTRL founder, chief executive and Sydney University Professor Michael Biercuk.

The NSW government has signed a commercial partnership with Q-CTRL, which will feed live Transport for NSW data into its quantum machines and develop processes over coming months which would allow the network “self-heal” in real time.

The government is paying Q-QTRL just over $150,000 proof of concept partnership, which has been undertaken as part of the state’s Future Transport Technology Roadmap.

“We don’t know how powerful it truly is until we start to see the data put in and ultimately what comes back in terms of real-time responses,” Transport Minister Andrew Constance said.

Read the full article on The Sydney Morning Herald.