Containing multitudes: SLAC scientist collaborates to create scalable qubits Developing quantum dots for next-generation science News Room Studying an object with zero dimensions takes serious creativity. Consider the singularity — a point packed with infinite energy that sparked the Big Bang. Or the humble mathematical point, an abstract but indispensable fixture in space-time. Grasping a thing that has no size or shape demands imagination and rigor. Or take qubits. Manipulating these zero-dimensional, information-carrying ripples in quantum space requires mental and manual dexterity. Yet those who work on qubits seldom tout the rich set of skills they bring to bear on their research. The scientific endeavor’s many creative dimensions are what drew Shannon Harvey to the work of finessing these dimensionless bits of information. “What I love about working in quantum information is that we can use today’s technologies to play with nature’s quantum features, something that until recently would have seemed incredible,” said Harvey, a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “I really thrive on the multifaceted nature of this research, solving and coming up with problems by embedding myself in the experimental details and trying to understand how they all fit together. For me, scientific exploration involves reading and writing papers, solving math problems, even soldering and welding. Often within the same day.” Harvey brings her multifaceted set of skills to Q-NEXT, a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory in partnership with SLAC. A national research hub, Q-NEXT aims to coax nature’s quantum features into sharing information over distances large and small. It’s a collaborative effort that’s helped by a knack for futzing with particles. The particle of Harvey’s attention is a type of qubit called a quantum dot. Picture an electron, a tiny ripple bopping