Physics (Internal)

Grooming Schrodinger's Cat: Improving Superconducting Quantum Electronics

This event is part of the Biophysics/Condensed Matter Seminar Series.

Superconducting materials enable the creation of novel electronics with fundamentally non-classical behavior. These quantum circuits can be used as detectors, magnetic field sensors, artificial atoms, and quantum bits, with applications ranging from chemistry to cryptography to studies of basic quantum mechanics. Fully realizing this potential requires us to cleverly design our circuits and experiments, to improve the performance of basic circuit elements, and to engineer scale-able systems. This work goes hand-in-hand with fundamental physics research, as each incremental improvement in performance opens up new experimental avenues. In this talk I will present some results from my own work tackling these practical challenges for applied and basic research, including studies of quasiparticle behavior in superconducting resonators and improvements of quantum-limited parametric amplifiers.