March 26, 2025 NYC Quantum Computing Virtual Meetup

We're trying to find in-person venues in Manhattan but in the meantime this talk will be virtual. It's possible that we can find a venue at the last minute so please provide an ID.

Our speaker is William Strickland, PhD who will be talking about error correction.

Title: Protecting qubits from bit and phase flips at the same time.

Abstract: Cooper pair transport in Josephson elements provides the key nonlinearity to construct quantum devices with superconducting circuits. While state of the art superconducting qubits are almost exclusively based on Al/AlOx/Al tunnel junctions, an alternative approach using hybrid superconductor-semiconductor Josephson junctions (JJs) can enable a superconducting qubit architecture with full electric field control. In this talk, I will present progress on using superconductor-semiconductor JJs as the key element in voltage-tunable qubits and couplers where our team has demonstrated a gate voltage tunable frequency (several GHz), impedance, and nonlinearity, as well as coherent control of the qubit state. Crucial to its application in qubit technologies, I will present a comprehensive analysis of the losses in the semiconductor and superconductor materials. Finally, I will present a new qubit architecture, named gatemonium, which may provide a path forward not only for improved coherence times in superconducting circuits based on S-Sm hybrid materials, but also provide a path forward for Josephson junction arrays with enhanced plasma frequencies.

Bio: William Strickland is a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Quantum Information Physics at New York University. His research focuses on making novel qubits with hybrid superconductor-semiconductor materials. He received his PhD from NYU in 2025 and his B.S. in Physics at UC Santa Barbara in 2018. He received a Quantum Computing Graduate Research fellowship from the Laboratory for Physical Sciences in 2021 and a Graduate Student Award from the Materials Research Society in 2022.