UNIVERSAL QUANTUM
In a quiet corner of Haywards Heath, just a brisk five-minute walk from the station, there’s a small revolution simmering. An interdisciplinary team of engineers are working to profoundly change the way computers work, and perhaps even evolve our understanding of the universe.
It’s a bold statement, but Universal Quantum are using their new laboratory and headquarters in mid-Sussex to design machines which use non-linear methods to calculate possibilities. Now providing the new frontier of computer science, quantum computing embraces the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems too complex for traditional (or ‘classical’) processors.
A main reason for the Universal Quantum establishing itself in Haywards Heath is the town’s proximity to the University of Sussex. The Falmer campus is where their initial research started, and they still maintain close ties. “It’s nicely commutable between London and Brighton, and cheaper than either,” Quantum Engineer Luuk Earl tells me. “We’ve also got space to play with. And it needs to be relatively quiet. These are very sensitive machines.” There’s potential for the area
