To watch the full video, click on the following link

ANDREA RODRIGUEZ BLANCO- DIRECTOR & WRITER

She studied physics at Univeristy of La Laguna in Tenerife. After working in experimental quantum computing with trapped ions at University of Sussex, she moved back to Spain. She is now doing a PhD in theoretical quantum computing and quantum information at Complutense University of Madrid.

BEATRIZ DEL POZO DÍEZ- CAMARA & EDITION 

She studies Journalism plus Media and Multimedia studies at University Europea of Madrid. In spite of her youth,  she stands out by her maturity and professionally with the camara. Pay attention to her, this is just the beginning of Bea del Pozo!

MARINO ELORZA FERNÁNDEZ- NARRATIVE 

He studies Media and Multimedia studies at University Europea of Madrid. He puts “The Voice” to this story. We are sure he will become one of the future voices of the spanish radio!

DAVID GUTIÉRREZ ALONSO – DIRECTOR’S RIGHT-HAND & THE PILGRIM’S GUIDE

He studied Business Administration and Management. His two passions are football and accounting. It seems that for now he prefers the Spanish Treasury Ministry rather than the Santiago Bernabeu. We are sure he would take a good care of the public funds! He played an important role in the correct development of the film and his help during all the process has been invaluable. His favorite role within the production was as a pilgrim’s guide. He acted as a quantum network iniside Legio VIII Quantae, allowing the correct transmission of quantum information between the pilgrims.

ANA MULLOR RODRÍGUEZ- FLAMENCO PHOTON

She is in her last year before University. She has always been able to combine her studies with her passion for dancing. She has been practicing it since she was eight years old! In the short-film, she represents a flamenco photon. She picks a qubit from a box full of two level-systems, like for example, an atom. She behaves as a wave, dancing at the speed of light, but she also acts like a particle to excite the qubit  by transmitting her energy and imparting a momentun-kick to it.

PAULA RODRIGUEZ DE LAS HERAS- GIMNASTIC QUBIT 

She is the youngest of the cast. Since she was six years old, she has been doing artistic gymnastics. In the story, she is a qubit, a two-energy level system of an atom. When she stands straight on her feet she represents the zero state of the qubit, however, when she receives enough energy of the photon, she does a handstand, representing the one state, the excited state of the qubit. She can spontaneously emit the photon and come back to the zero-position state. And when she is doing somersaults on the air, she is representing a superposition state.

CLAUDIA, INÉS & CARLOTA- THE PILGRIMS

They are also in the last year of High School, previous to their University studies.  They represent the power of friendship and moved by their curiosity, they walked together towards Legio VIII Quantae following the European’s Robins.  It seems that the orientation of these migratory birds is based on a kind of quantum mechanical compass, that helps them to detect the weak Earth’s magnetic fields during annual migrations. They arrived at the last stop, León Cathedral, and if individually, their friendship was strong, entangled they will never be separable.

ADELIA, PRIS, AMOR, TACHI, MARI & NATI- THE PLAYERS OF THE QUANTUM GAME

This group of friends have been playing cards together every Thursday for almost 30 years. Even thought they were really professionals of the spanish-type cards, they adapted really well to the “quantum cards” game and now they can’t stop! By using this game, the physicists from the Academy achieved that they understood quantum circuits. They try to construct error correcting codes with these cards, which some represent qubits, others single-qubit gates, entangling gates, or for example measuring projectors. However, there is always one of them in charge to introduce  errors into the code; the task of the rest is to overcome this by their ability to reconstruct the quantum circuit.  

Author’s opinion

Legio VIII Quantae arose as a consequence of the Quantum Shorts Film Festival 2018.  It is not always easy  to come up with a good story and, a quantum inspired one is not less.  I felt that every idea that came up to my mind would not be understandable for most of the people around me, despite of those at the Physics faculty and that, would have been really similar as if I had showed them a paper on quantum computing in which I have been working on. They would have listened to me, at least, apparently but, as it would have seemed very difficult to understand, too abstract, it would have not made too much impact on them.

Based on that, I wanted to do an story with a message, taking quantum into people every-day’s life. In a five minute video it is difficult to clearly explain concepts, but it is a starting point. For example, with the cast, working with people that never heard about quantum before, you could start noticing how they became intrigued and asked you questions about the scenes they were involved in during the film, even the oldest ones, they wanted me to explain them about the meaning of those quantum gates in their new cards! The thing is that if you have PATIENCE to explain, the best you can, of course, a quantum effect or a quantum concept in a simple way, people can get the idea or at least partially; in any case, what I am sure about is that, the word quantum will not sound unfamiliar to them anymore. In the video we just incorporated a bit of quantumness into some of their ordinary activities. The same happened for people on the streets that saw us filming. They approached to ask about the Moore’s Law or the Bell’s telephone numbers displayed on the posters. And this is like a domino effect, they will show the video to their sons, to their parents, their friends and so on…and those will make also questions about quantum physics.  However, this will never happen if the majority of scientists keep the nature’s quantumness  in complicated ” high-impact” publications, just understandable by their quantum community .

On the other hand, the ” technological apocalypses” by the end of Moore’s Law tries to catch, above all, the attention of people in my country. Spanish people is not concerned that research lead to progress and that it is not to be taken as something secondary. Those that are not ready to adapt to the new technology developments and, in this particular case, to the emerging  quantum technologies, will remain behind. Therefore, I think that a place like Legio VIII Quantae is possible if everyone put a bit of effort onto it, and to be honest, it would be a really cool place!

Legio VIII Quantae is the name that was used to denote the quantum settlement established in León since the end of the year 2022. This name was chosen in remembrance of the Roman origin of the city, placed on the northwest region of the Iberian Peninsula, where other legions such as, the Legio VI Victix and the Legio VII Gemina were settled down between the I and the IV d.C.

Legio VII Quantae arose from the need to expand the “Technological Quantum Empire” after the fall of the “Silicon Empire” settled in Silicon Valley, California, since the 1970s. At the end of 2018, the first smartphones with 7 nm chips appeared on the market. The  production cost and characterization of those chips was already estimated in 300 million dollars.  In that occasion,  several companies stopped their production before arriving to that minuscule chip-size due to the high costs and  furthermore, it was estimated that the investment for the next node, 5 nm, would duplicate.

That’s how, in 2020 the big technological companies announced that the launch of the new telephone devices will have to wait at least for another year. Warning signs about the fact that the end of Moore’s Law, the end of the “Semiconductor’s Era” was close, began to emerge among the staunch consumers and the scientific community.  This “technological apocalypses” was predicted by Gordon Moore, co-funder of  Intel, already in 1965. However, despite the efforts of the big companies, the technological market came to a standstill and the sales slumped.  Primarily, this situation cause a reduction of personnel but, immediately after, it continued with the closure of the smallest international headquarters, affecting strongly to those more unstable economies within Europe, a reality that reached the city of León.

In order to reverse this economic loss, a group of physicists met to find solutions based on the emerging quantum technologies. The task was not easy, considering that, most of the population knew almost nothing about the foundations of quantum mechanics. For that reason they founded in December 2022, the Quantum Academy for Arts and Science City of León, with the main objective to spread notions about this theory, to train and supervise the people of the city in such a way that, bit by bit, they could start adapting the jobs to the quantum technology demands.  Nevertheless, the labor of the Academy did not stop there, and they commenced with an evangelization of quantum physics to the rest of society,  imbuing to all generations, from children in schools to the elderly people. This was quite amusing, because elderly people now spent the afternoon playing “quantum cards”, trying to reduce the fault-tolerance of their opponent’s quantum circuits and, they really enjoyed it!. This effect expanded to other sectors, such as Art, where atom-light interactions were explained through “flamenco photons” and “gymnastic qubits” merged in a creative quantum-inspired dance. In the field of bioscience, for example, they started using optical pump atomic sensors for early detection screening of neurodegenerative diseases and cardiopathies. Gradually, their hospitals started putting personalized patients’s medication into practice by using quantum learning algorithms. All this together with the major progress in magnetic resonance imaging at molecular level.

The results of this revolution in thought were well-known and gradually, national and international people, guided by their curiosity,  started their pilgrimage to the city. These pilgrims oriented themselves thanks to the quantum compass of the European Robin, in analogy to the scallop shells of those doing the Camino de Santiago, which became migratory birds to this city. Once in the city, they learned to look at nature and question about it. Those who completed the path and finally arrived to the last stop, León Cathedral, were aware that they were already observing nature from another point of view; what they did not know was that they would remain FOREVER ENTANGLED TO THE LEGIO VIII QUANTAE…