“I’m going back. It’s almost like a cycle in your life,” muses physicist Abhay Ram. Ram, a principal research scientist at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) at MIT, is returning to a field he first embraced as a graduate student at the Institute 50 years ago: quantum mechanics. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, he is exploring different pathways for using the power and speed of quantum computing — when it is eventually available — to study electromagnetic waves in plasmas, the so called “fourth state of…
