Two physics graduate students, Xiaoyu Jiang and Abigail Shearrow, have had their projects awarded funding through QISE-NET, the Quantum Information Science and Engineering Network. Run through the University of Chicago, QISE-NET is open to any student pursuing an advanced degree in any field of quantum science. Jiang, Shearrow, and other students in their cohort earn up to three years of support, including funding, mentoring and training at annual workshops. All awardees are paired with a mentoring QISE company or national lab, at which they will complete part of their projects. Jiang and Shearrow explain their projects below.

Xiaoyu Yang, Saffman Group | Mentoring partner: Argonne National Lab

“The research I proposed aims to, with the help of Argonne National Lab’s computational expertise, build a platform that models and simulates the performance of the atomic qubit array (AQuA) experiment in Prof. Saffman’s lab. This could help us to understand the effect of various technical problems, such as laser noise, in the experiment, and guide us in improving the gate fidelities. On the other hand, the platform could also be a useful tool in simulating and designing novel quantum gate protocols and quantum algorithms that can be performed on AQuA.”

Abigail Shearrow, McDermott Group | Mentoring Partner: Google

“We are developing a new type of superconducting qubit that provides protection from noise and decoherence at the hardware level. Our near-term goals are to prepare quantum superposition states and to transfer them into the protected regime where we will look for extended energy relaxation and dephasing times. We will next implement protected gates, which we will characterize by doing interleaved randomized benchmarking.”