Giovanni Scuri

Nestled beneath manicured green lawns and paved light-gray sidewalks, the subterranean Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab at Stanford University looks alive on this warm afternoon, respiring like a limby organism at rest. Ventilation hums and instruments at times beep in the dark rooms where red and green and yellow lights flicker between the cables that seem to at once emerge from and recede into one another, sprawling across the optical tables. It all appears to be intentionally undisturbed, not least because the lab has to be below ground to minimize the interference of any vibrations—say, from something like micro movements of tectonic plates, a fairly likely occurrence in the state of California.  

Gio, who works in the lab as a postdoctoral researcher and has just returned from a conference in Seattle, is explaining each device to me—its name, its cost, and its role in the homeostasis of the hyper-plugged beast that is the quantum photonics lab. He seems most excited, however, to tell me about the long scroll of colorful lines written in Source Code Pro and displayed on a monitor next to the entrance. A programming code—and, importantly, a meticulously commented one—written by an intern who wanted to create something that others in the lab could understand and reuse. Gio tells me it’s refreshing to see stuff so thoughtfully documented in academia. 

“So,” I say, unintentionally diverting the conversation, “what was this conference you just came from?” 

“It’s a conference organized by the Materials Research Society,” Gio says, “and it’s for people who are interested in work at the intersection of materials science and physics and who want to understand its practical applications, which is pretty much our lab. Nowadays, people from both academia and industry attend the conference. For me specifically, because I study defects in materials for quantum applications, it was a good way to promote our work and network with people in the field.”

“Uh huh,” I add. “Fair to say you were campaigning?” 

Gio laughs.

“Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.”

Quantum, shorthand for quantum mechanics, is what happens when the world around us is studied on a tiny scale (nanoscale, or billionths of a meter) and in very cold environments (just a few degrees above -273.15°C, the absolute zero). In these conditions, rules of the reality we know start to shift. Particles like electrons and photons start doing things that seem impossible, like being in two places at once or tunneling through barriers. Scientists believe these strange behaviors, if truly understood and fully leveraged, could enable things like computers that analyze multiple outcomes at once or communication channels in which any attempt to eavesdrop would be noticed immediately. To academic researchers, quantum has been a point of interest for a while, but to tech companies and Wall Street, quantum has been a premature gamble. Until recently, that is. 

“I mean,” I say, “I am not even in this field but I can tell that quantum has become more of a thing. I remember seeing that investment funds have even created quantum ETFs that people can buy. Do you think it’s some sort of quantum gold rush?”

“I think for sure it’s been happening for a while,” Gio notes. “You already have companies working on things that rely on these quantum effects, like superconductors, and you see a lot of investment going into corporate research for this. The progress in the field is happening much faster now that companies are getting on this train. But I do think it’s important to emphasize that this is actually very good for the field.”

“What do you mean? Isn’t it technically creating competition for academic researchers?” 

“Yes, definitely,” he adds, “especially because corporations have more capital to invest and also have to operate on much quicker timelines. I think that’s good though, because it gives a jolt to academia to move with more energy and to seek creative solutions. In the end, whatever accelerates discovery is good from my perspective.”

“Gotta love capitalism, I guess.” 

I met Gio in Boston in late 2017 through my friend Tamara. At the time, he was Tamara’s new boyfriend whom she met at Harvard University, where they were both doing their PhD in physics. Five years later, he became her husband and one year after that, the two left Boston and moved to the Bay Area. During these years, Gio made a name for himself in quantum physics and became one of the researchers at the forefront of this field. 

To be at the forefront of quantum is somewhat loopy—in these dark rooms, where temperatures are cooled to lethal degrees and where researchers in white coats are doing everything they can to show the world works in ways we’ve been taught are impossible, one’s mind begins to drift toward existential thoughts. Why? Why do we want to deconstruct the frameworks we had been constructing for so long?

“Okay,” I say, “I understand particles in quantum states have the potential to be very useful, but what I don’t fully understand is why particles in their ‘normal' state can’t be equally as useful? Aren’t electrons already fundamental enough to explain how nature works? Maybe what I am really trying to understand is why these strange quantum behaviors are so much better than regular particle behaviors that we study in high school and college?”

“Think about those electrons,” Gio answers. “Obviously, our understanding of their behavior is incredibly important. Everything from electricity to materials science, all of those are predicated on our understanding of particles like electrons. But there are issues with particles—with electrons particularly, they are very lossy when they are in materials.”

Lossy is a whimsical yet precise word to describe the innate nature of electrons that is not immediately obvious to a non-physicist, which is that electrons moving through regular materials waste a lot of energy. A copper wire, as an example, is a regular material that will be familiar to many because it’s used for household electricity. When voltage is applied to such material, the free electrons in the copper wire start to move and create an electric current, but in that process, these free electrons also collide with atoms in the material. Each collision dissipates energy as heat, a process formally known as resistance. Most of us don’t refer to this as “resistance,” but we know when we see it in the extreme—wire overheating, for example.

The problem with resistance is that it… well, resists. If we consider the application of the same copper wire in electric trains, for example, we now know that any supply of electricity to the train will create heat as waste. Whenever the train needs to move faster, more electricity will need to be supplied, which will create more heat. This wasteful heat in turn might cause problems, such as overheated wires and motors or even just mechanical wear-and-tear, a process that ultimately puts constraints on how fast and how efficiently the train can move.

“To get around this,” Gio continues, “you can induce a quantum state, which really means you create an environment for these electrons to start exhibiting quantum properties. By doing so, you can create a superconductor, in which no loss of energy happens. And scientists already have figured out how to do this. It’s what you see with high-speed Maglev trains in Japan, and to some extent in China and South Korea.”

Maglev trains—magnetic-levitation trains—do not touch train tracks and instead levitate using powerful superconducting magnets that have been cooled with liquid helium. These superconducting magnets interact with coils in the track to generate lift and thrust. The quantum effect here stems from electrons forming pairs with each other at incredibly low temperatures, something that does not usually happen at atomic scales where electrons repel each other. As electrons pair with each other, they form a synchrony, almost like in a choreographed dance, and act like one giant quantum wave. No collisions, no resistance, no heat as waste. This is why superconducting maglev trains can achieve greater maximum speed and have lower maintenance costs compared to electric trains. 

“So, you’re basically saying,” I ask, “that we already have real-life applications of quantum mechanics? I don’t get it though, why is quantum not a bigger thing if we’ve figured it out?”

“It’s actually a very good question,” Gio says. “And that’s the irony of the current state of quantum: the economics don’t work out, at least for now. In the case of maglev trains, what we have figured out is how to create quantum effects but what’s happening there still requires energy consumption. You have to cool helium to extremely low temperatures, which requires a lot of energy in itself and therefore also costs a lot of money. The real unlock there would be if we found or synthesized a superconductor that works at room temperature and normal pressure, without the expensive cooling.”

After a few hours in the lab, Gio suggests we see some sun while it’s still out. Ever since moving to California, he has been spending more time outdoors—a change from the decade spent in New York and Boston where much of life happens in cavernous exile. 

“You okay if we drive to the woods?” he asks. “Driving is a big part of my life now.”

He drives us to Los Altos, a quaint enclave where he and Tamara like to go on the weekends. Gio tells me he likes walking through the Los Altos Heritage Orchard, which started out as a five-acre land of apricot trees in 1901 and became what is today a reminder of California’s agricultural roots, of everything that preceded the siliconized reputation it espouses today. We walk through this orchard and make our way to the lush Redwood Grove Nature Preserve, where Gio tells me more about his scientific roots as we descend into the balsamic depths of the grove. 

Thanks to a great high school physics teacher, Gio’s interest in physics developed while he was a student at the American School of Milan. He excelled and ended up enrolling at Columbia University in New York, where he got exposed to research in physics which then led him to Harvard University, where he got his PhD in Physics. It was at Harvard that Gio made a name for himself in quantum. His research established a path to controlling light and energy using materials just one atom thick, by building what were essentially tiny, flexible mirrors and light switches at the quantum level. Albeit applicable at a miniscule scale, the findings themselves were monumental: controlling light and energy at the atomic scale will be key to developing the next generation of technologies, from ultra-fast optical chips and quantum computers to secure communication systems. Be it computational biology or national security, almost every industry could benefit significantly from these applications. 

Gio describes this phase of his career as the ladder toward understanding how quantum systems and their properties can be controlled. Once the ladder was set up, he then wanted to go further and understand how quantum systems can be isolated to preserve their quantum properties. Controlling quantum properties is knowing how to interact with the quantum systems: turning them on and off, tuning them, measuring them. But isolation of such properties is also necessary, especially to understand how to protect quantum behaviors that can be very fragile. The way I understand it, control and isolation of quantum properties are like trying to tame a soap bubble. You might know how to create it, but if you touch it, the soap bubble pops. What if there was a way to not only create a soap bubble but to also gently shape it and shine light through it?

This is where Stanford’s Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab comes in. Gio joined the lab as a postdoctoral researcher to study this exact question: how to ensure the stability of quantum effects (isolation) while making them tunable enough (control) for real-life applications? The lab focuses on defects in materials like diamond or silicon carbide because a defect in these materials can act like a tiny cage, holding a single particle in place and shielding it from noise.  Again there is something loopy about this setup. While the rest of the world fawns over flawless diamonds, quantum physicists forage for flawed ones. Why? 

Because, it turns out, in materials without defects—as is the case with a flawless diamond—electrons don’t provide useful quantum states. They are either locked too tightly in place or vanish too quickly. But when a defect is introduced, it can trap an electron, turning it into a quantum particle with a long-lasting quantum state. This way, the defect itself becomes a tiny quantum system, balancing isolation from its surroundings with just enough accessibility for control. And, balancing control and isolation of quantum effects in a material could become the answer that we need to understand how to productionize quantum computers, which among other things could lead us toward superconductor materials without extreme conditions like very low temperatures. 

“So, where do you see this field in twenty years?” I ask. “It feels like there is still so much to answer and understand with quantum. What would you be excited to contribute to, once you have your own research group?” 

“I think,” he answers, “in twenty years, I would love to see the things we worked on actually implemented in real life. For me, maybe the coolest outcome of my work, both current and future, would be quantum computers leading to discoveries in biology and medicine that we can’t figure out now due to processing limitations.”

Forty minutes in, deep into the woods, we find ourselves walking in the shadows of formidable redwood trees, shielded entirely from the sun. Both in a haze from the warm afternoon glow, we stop talking. It’s quiet for a while until Gio stops by a tree, runs his hand across the deep terra cotta bark, and breaks the silence.   

“I think redwood is my favorite tree,” he says. “Redwood bark can hold up a lot of moisture, which makes it more resistant to fires.”

How does he know this, I ask. 

“I don’t know. I started paying attention to redwood after moving to California and coming here on the weekends. Maybe because I feel like there’s a mystery to the tree—like there is always something more to discover.”

𐫱

Two months later, I meet up with Gio again; this time at the Filoli estate in Woodside, just a twenty-minute drive from Mountain View, where he and Tamara live. The 654-acre estate is quite the sight: manicured gardens radiate from the opulent Georgian-Revival-style mansion, which was built in the early 20th century for William Bower Bourns II, a prominent Californian entrepreneur and a socialite. It’s a far cry from Stanford’s subterranean world of excised and isolated quantum effects. 

And yet the estate is just as fitting a setting for our second date—for all this talk of measurement and precision and control and isolation, outside of work, Gio appears rather carefree. In his crisp striped collar shirt and deep-navy jeans, he looks natural in these lush gardens, an image entirely incongruent with that of a top-notch researcher in quantum physics.  

“I used to be a bit more intense early on,” he explains when I point out this contrast. “But I think being in academia helped with that. When there is no structure and no singular outcome, as was the case with academia, I learned that it’s just better to be chill.”

“But I also feel your interests are very chill,” I add. “You know, you’re not into showing off what you do with your free time and you don’t feel like you have to have a hobby that you need to be number one at. Something I associate a lot with achievement-oriented people.”

“Yeah,” he says and laughs. “Very standard European interests, I guess. That’s probably a part of it too. Growing up in Italy definitely gave me a well-rounded perspective on life.”

Gio was born in Milan to the Scuri family, which in Italian means dark. Before they knew they were having a boy, Gio’s parents considered naming their first child Chiara, a parallel universe that Gio is happy to not be part of, solely because Chiara in Italian means bright. 

“Chiara Scuri,” he says. “It would have been rough.” 

Additional comical details arise in this family portrait, like the last names of his cousins, which span a good chunk of the color spectrum: Rossi (red), Maroni (brown), Bianchi (white). The understated Boccaccian style of humor woven throughout his ancestral fabric is precisely how Gio comes off in person. Cosmopolitan but laidback, ambitious but at ease, knowledgeable but never too high-brow. 

“I assume you liked growing up in Milan?”

“Yes, for sure,” Gio says. “From the age of fourteen, you can start having your own social life in Milan, as if you were an adult. As teenagers, my friends and I really had the freedom to live. Guys and girls all hung out and went out together. Or, if we weren’t doing that, then all the guys were going to see soccer games.”

One could say Gio is quite Italian. It’s in the way he lilts the “tz” and the “ella” in mozzarella and in the way he paces his afternoon espresso break. But a perhaps more accurate description is to say that he is very European, which is to say that he doesn’t get worked up over things—unless the thing is soccer. Gio is a fan and a lifelong supporter of Inter Milan, his hometown team. 

“Were you one of those boys who started soccer at an early age?” I ask.

“Actually, not really. When I was younger, I thought it was boring. It was an acquired taste for me because it was such an integral part of the Italian social fabric that I ended up loving it through exposure and appreciating how tactical the sport is. That’s when I started playing more regularly as well. I don’t think I was particularly good at it, but I really loved the communal experience.”

Again we encounter the comedic element in this story. Inter is among Italy’s top three soccer clubs and has a longstanding rivalry with AC Milan and—to a somewhat lesser extent—with Juventus. On paper, the rivalry is between the teams and the players, but in practice, it’s between the organized fan associations, the often fanatically devoted Ultras. A subset of these fans, known in every European country with prominent soccer culture as hooligans, express this devotion through violence and vandalism. Gio’s lifelong support of Inter is equal to that of an Ultras and yet he couldn’t be further from the stereotype. 

“Where do you think it comes from, this fanatical devotion?” I ask. “This is something that I also witnessed growing up in Europe, and I think only after moving to the US did I realize how characteristically tribal it is.”

“I mean, it can be such a cathartic experience to be a soccer fan,” Gio explains. “When you’re at a stadium with eighty thousand people, and you’re all chanting in unison, there is something religious about it. I can understand why hooligan culture developed around the sport. It’s easy to see this catharsis for more than it is, to take it very seriously, and see this bond with other fans as fundamental to your identity. But I think this tendency for tribalism, especially among men, exists in other cultures as well. I don’t know what it is, but there is certainly something about young guys and rage and identity that plays into this.”

Gio never became part of this tribal culture but what he lacked in commitment to groupthink he made up for nerdy devotion to Inter. Three games in particular stand out in Gio’s memory as those that cemented his love for the sport and for Inter: Inter vs. Sampdoria (2004), Inter vs. AC Milan (2005), and Inter vs. Barcelona (2010). The team won in all three cases but the games were far from predictable. In 2004, Inter was losing 0:2 until the last five minutes when, miraculously, the team scored three goals and won 3:2. In 2005, the team also won 3:2 at the very last moment with a corner kick-in, at which point Gio jumped on his friend and to this day considers this game as his favorite to rewatch. And in 2010, Inter won 3:1, but the game was so stressful for Gio that he spent most of the game cleaning the fireplace under the TV. 

This passion was a relationship novelty for Tamara. One time, when Inter was playing and Gio was watching the game, she monitored his pulse and noticed that his resting heart rate jumped to ninety beats per minute.

“I think it’s an emotional release for me and it’s my way to relax,” he adds and cracks up. “But she disagrees.”

The disagreement may come in part from thinking of his passion for soccer as an extension of and not as the perfect foil to his hyper-rational job, the one chance he gets to have unbridled emotional release and be reminded that, in the end, all the serious stuff is really not that serious. Which in itself is an amusing cognitive dissonance to observe because Gio’s levelheadedness is exactly what I remember talking about with Tamara a year into their relationship, when I asked her what she liked about Gio. 

“I realized I am at ease when I am around him,” she told me then. “His approach to life is that everything will work out, one way or another, and that there is no point in worrying endlessly.”