Post by Yajur Preetham

Hey guys, I’m excited to share two updates from the past few weeks! First, I had the opportunity to present my research on trapping and cooling Rubidium-87 atoms for scalable entanglement distribution. This was a culmination of 2 semesters worth of learning, designing, and building. Neutral atoms are among the most promising qubit platforms for quantum information science due to their long coherence times and immense scalability. Thus, exploring how they can serve as building blocks for future quantum networks has been a fascinating journey, and sharing that work with others made it even more rewarding! Second, I’ve been accepted into UC Berkeley’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program! This summer, I’ll be working on developing high frequency interconnects for superconducting circuits. While superconducting circuits are arguably the most well established qubit platform, they suffer from lack of scalability due to limitations associated with operation in the low-frequency microwave C and X bands. Thus, I will work on pushing the interconnects between transmons (a type of superconducting charge qubit) to the higher frequency V and W bands, unlocking the potential for huge scalability as well as hybrid computing architectures (ex: transmons + neutral atoms)! I am truly thankful to my PI, Aziza Suleymanzade, as well as everyone else in my lab for supporting me through this journey and helping me learn what it takes to be a true physicist! I look forward to continue working with them this summer and broadening my knowledge within the fields of quantum computing and quantum networking. P.S. I attached a picture of atoms we successfully cooled and trapped in the magneto-optical trap (MOT) that I helped design and build! :D