National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Physicist Mario Krenn sees artificial intelligence as a muse — a source of inspiration and ideas for scientists. It’s a description born from his past research and his current work at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, where he and his colleagues develop AI algorithms that can help them learn new ideas and concepts in physics.

His efforts began years ago, when a research team Krenn was part of struggled to come up with an experiment that would let them observe a specific type of quantum entanglement. Krenn, suspecting that their intuition was getting in the way, developed a computer algorithm that can design quantum experiments.

“I let the algorithm run, and within a few hours it found exactly the solution that we as human scientists couldn’t find for many weeks,” he said. Using the blueprint created by the computer, his colleagues were able to build the setup in the laboratory and use it to observe the phenomenon for the first time.

In a subsequent case, the algorithm overcame a barrier by reviving a long-forgotten technique and applying it in a new context. The scientists were immediately able to generalize this idea to other situations, and they wrote about it in a paper for Physical Review Letters.