Creating quantum systems with semiconductors and molecules

David D. Awschalom
University of Chicago
Online WebEx seminar
Wed, January 26, 2022 at 11:00 AM
Our technological preference for perfection can only lead us so far: as traditional transistor-based electronics rapidly approach the atomic scale, small amounts of disorder begin to have outsized negative effects. Surprisingly, one of the most promising pathways out of this conundrum may emerge from current efforts to embrace defects to construct quantum devices and machines that enable new information processing and sensing technologies based on the quantum nature of electrons and atomic nuclei. Individual defects in diamond, silicon carbide, and other wide-gap semiconductors have attracted interest as they possess an electronic spin state that can be employed as a solid-state quantum bit at room temperature. These systems have a built-in optical interface in the visible and telecom bands, retain their coherence over millisecond timescales, and can be polarized, manipulated, and read out using a simple combination of light and microwaves. We discuss integrating single spin qubits into wafer-scale, commercial optoelectronic devices, extending the coherence of these spin qubits, and demonstrating the control and entanglement of a single nuclear spin with an electron spin. Optically addressable spin qubits can also be created, engineered, and scaled through a purely synthetic chemical approach. Moreover, these structures offer new opportunities to construct hybrid systems. We demonstrate the optical initialization and readout, and coherent control, of ground-state spins in organometallic molecules. This bottom-up approach offers avenues to create designer qubits and to deploy the diverse capabilities of chemical synthesis for scalable quantum technologies.
David D. Awschalom
David Awschalom is the Liew Family Professor and Vice Dean for Research in the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and Director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange. He is also the inaugural director of Q-NEXT, one of the US Department of Energy Quantum Information Science Research Centers. He works in the emerging fields of spintronics and quantum information engineering, where his students develop new methods to explore and control the quantum states of individual electrons, nuclei, and photons in semiconductors and molecules. His research includes implementations of quantum information processing with potential applications in computing, sensing, and communication. Professor Awschalom received the APS Oliver E. Buckley Prize and Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize, the European Physical Society Europhysics Prize, the MRS David Turnbull Award and Outstanding Investigator Prize, the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, and the IUPAP International Magnetism Pize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the European Academy of Sciences.
No job openings are currently posted. Please visit https://rpijobs.rpi.edu/ for more employment opportunities at Rensselaer.