Two projects awarded QSE Collaborative Research Fellowships
© 2022 EPFL Giovanni Boero
The inaugural Quantum Science and Engineering Research Fellowship grants have been awarded to two outstanding collaborative projects: one from Giuseppe Carleo and Nicola Marzari, and the other from Christophe Galland and Giovanni Boero.
As part of its goal of fostering scientific research in the domain of quantum science and engineering, the QSE Center at EPFL has awarded its inaugural edition of QSE Collaborative Research Fellowships to two outstanding research projects in the field of quantum.The fellows will work on research projects that explicitly need a cross-expertise approach and that are high risk/high gain in nature.
The two awarded projects are ‘Cryo-compatible integrated control hardware for NV-Based quantum sensors' from Christophe Galland and Giovanni Boero, and from ‘Many-body neural simulations of quantum materials’ Gisueppe Carleo and Nicola Marzari.
The project ‘Cryo-compatible integrated control hardware for NV-Based quantum sensors' aims at democratizing quantum sensing in challenging environments by developing microchips that locally generate coherent microwave control signals necessary for their operation.
Most quantum technologies rely on our ability to coherently control individual quantum systems (such as nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond) through classical electromagnetic fields, such as microwaves oscillating at few GHz. Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are a promising instance having various applications in nanoscale sensing and quantum computing. The generation, amplification and delivery of coherent microwaves to NV centers become daunting engineering challenges when the application requires tight integration, cryogenic operation, low power consumption, low cost, etc.
In this project, the QSE Research Fellow will develop a microchip technology that addresses all these challenges and broadens the application range of NV centers and other solid-state quantum systems. Building on Dr. Boero’s expertise in cryo-compatible microwave integrated circuits, the QSE Fellow will design new chips fitting on a 5-cent coin that take over the functions of several bulky lab instruments. The chips will synthesize and deliver coherent microwave signals directly at the location where NV centers are deployed, reducing complexity, footprint, power consumption and parasitic losses and interferences. The new devices will be tested and implemented in quantum sensing protocols in Prof. Galland’s group, where diamond photonic integrated circuits are being developed to optimally deliver laser light to NV centers and collect their fluorescence. This QSE Collaborative Research Fellowship will enable the initialization, manipulation and read-out of spin quantum states in diamond with an unprecedented level of integration.
The project ‘Many-body neural simulations of quantum materials’ will focus on materials giving rise to complex and possibly entangled magnetic states of great relevance in information and- communication technologies, both for spintronics and memory applications, or as future platforms for quantum computing. Quantum materials represent one of the most exciting frontiers for condensed-matter physics and materials science. These materials exhibit phenomena that cannot be understood with established models, making understanding and predicting their properties an intrinsically challenging task. TThe project will build on collaboration between Carleo’s (CQSL) and Marzari’s (THEOS) groups – the latter using state-of-the-art electronic-structure methods to determine the spin Hamiltonians of the materials at hand, and the former using state-of-the-art machine learning approaches to study quantum phenomena on quantum computers.
