Members – QuLab

Baleegh Abdo (postdoc); Nicolas Bergeal (postdoc); Etienne Boaknin (postdoc); Markus Brink (postdoc); Philippe Campagne-Ibarcq (postdoc); Valla Fatemi (postdoc); Simon Fisette (undergrad); Nick Frattini (student); Alvin Gao (undergrad); Kurtis Geerlings (student); Alexander Grimm (postdoc); Michael Hatridge (postdoc); Max Hays (student); Benjamin Huard (visiting scientist); Archana Kamal (student); Philippe Hyafil (postdoc); Angela Kou (postdoc); Gijs de Lange (postdoc); Zaki Leghtas (postdoc); Andrew Lingenfelter (undergrad); Yehan Liu (student); Vladimir Manucharyan (student); Adam Marblestone (undergrad); Nick Masluk (student); Zlatko Minev (student); Shantanu Mundhada (student); Anirudh Narla (student); Chris Pang (undergrad); Frederic Pierre (postdoc); Ioan Pop (postdoc); Chad Rigetti (student); Flavius Schackert (student); Kyle Serniak (student); Irfan Siddiqi (postdoc); Volodymyr Sivak (student); Katrina Sliwa (student); Clarke Smith (student); Steven Touzard (student); Ioanniss Tsioutsios (postdoc); Jayameenakshi Venkatraman (student); Rajamani Vijayaraghavan (student); Uri Vool (student); Zhixin Wang (student); Chris Wilson (postdoc); Xu Xiao (student); Evan Zalys-Geller (student); William Zeng (undergrad);

Michel H. Devoret
phone : 203-432-4273

Michel Devoret graduated from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications in Paris in 1975 and started graduate work in molecular quantum physics at the University of Orsay. He then joined Professor Anatole Abragam’s laboratory in the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique (CEA) at Saclay to work on nuclear magnetic resonance in solid hydrogen, and received his PhD from Paris University in 1982. Subsequently, he spent two post-doctoral years working under Prof. John Clarke’s guidance at the University of California, Berkeley, with John Martinis, who was a PhD student at that time. In a series of experiments, the trio showed that a Josephson tunnel junction could, under a controlled microwave environment, behave as an artificial atom “with wires”, the basis of what is now known as a superconducting quantum bit. Michel Devoret pursued this research on quantum mechanical electronics upon his return to Saclay, starting his own group with Daniel Esteve and Cristian Urbina. The main achievements of the “quantronics group” in this period of his career were the measurement of the traversal time of tunneling, the invention of the single electron pump, the first measurement of the effect of atomic valence on the conductance of a single atom, and the first observation of the Ramsey fringes of a superconducting artificial atom named quantronium. He was promoted director of research at CEA-Saclay in 1995 and in 2002 he joined Yale University as a full professor. In 2007, Michel was appointed to the College de France. He gave there every year new cycles of lectures on quantum mesoscopic physics until 2012.
Currently the F. W. Beinecke Professor of Applied Physics at Yale University – where he has taught and led a research group for the last 20 years – he focuses his research on experimental solid-state physics with emphasis on quantum information processing. In the new type of electronics his lab develops, not only electrical collective degrees of freedom like currents and voltages behave quantum mechanically, but single microwave photons can be made to interact controllably with artificial atoms. Such mesoscopic processes are particularly important in quantum circuits based on Josephson tunnel junctions combined with superconducting resonators, which are now viewed as one of the main platforms for the implementation of quantum information processors. Michel has contributed, in collaboration with his Yale colleagues Rob Schoelkopf, Leonid Glazman and Steven Girvin, to the invention of two new artificial superconducting atoms, the transmon and the fluxonium. Also, after having developed new types of amplifiers reaching the quantum limit, he employed them to determine the fundamental back-action of measurements. In particular, Michel’s team showed that it was possible to stop a quantum jump in its flight and reverse it. He currently investigates the new phenomena of quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum operation. With his team he recently realized the full quantum error correction of a superconducting qubit.
Michel Devoret is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003) and a member of the French Academy of Sciences (2008). Michel has received the Ampere Prize of the French Academy of Science (together with Daniel Esteve, 1991), the Descartes-Huygens Prize of the Royal Academy of Science of the Netherlands (1996) and the Europhysics-Agilent Prize of the European Physical Society (together with Daniel Esteve, Hans Mooij and Yasunobu Nakamura, 2004). He is also a recipient of the John Stewart Bell Prize, which he received jointly with Rob Schoelkopf in 2013. In 2014, together with John Martinis and Rob Schoelkopf, he was awarded, the Fritz London Memorial Prize. He received the Olli Lounaasma Prize in 2016.

Luigi Frunzio
phone : 203-432-4273

Luigi received his Masters in Physics at Federico II University in Naples, Italy, earning 110/110 Cum Laude. His thesis studied the effects of the intrinsic fluctuations in current biased Josephson tunnel junctions, and his preliminary work took place at the Superconductivity Department of the Instituto di Cibernetica of the CNR under the supervision of Professors Arturo Tagliacozzo and Roberto Cristiano. He also has a PhD from Orsay University. Luigi is currently a Senior Research Scientist at the Department of Applied Physics at Yale University. He works jointly with Prof. Devoret and Prof. Schoelkopf on experiments involving superconducting qubits. His curriculum vitae is available here

Giselle Maillet Administrative Associate

Yale University, Applied Physics
15 Prospect Street / PO Box 208284
Becton Center 401
New Haven, CT 06520-8284
phone : 203-432-9654

Theresa Evangeliste Administrative Assistant

Yale University, Applied Physics
15 Prospect Street / PO Box 208284
Becton Center 401
New Haven, CT 06520-8284
phone : 203-432-2210

Nuch Graves Program Coordinator/Financial Analyst

Yale University, Applied Physics
15 Prospect Street / PO Box 208284
Becton Center 401
New Haven, CT 06520-8284
phone : 203-432-9610

Maria Rao Administrative Assistant
Yale University, Applied Physics
15 Prospect Street / PO Box 208284
Becton Center 401
New Haven, CT 06520-8284
phone : 203-432-4273

Maria lives in Branford, CT and has worked at Yale since 2004. She comes from Bayer Pharmaceutical Corp. with solid corporate experience. She has a teaching degree in foreign languages (Italian, French, and Spanish) from Southern Connecticut State University. She is our awesome administrative assistant. Young, energetic, and dynamic, she gets us all the tools and research equipment we want and takes care of all the paperwork involved – with a smile that’s always appreciated.

Benjamin Brock

Ben was born and raised on Long Island, NY. He received his BS in physics from Haverford College, where his thesis focused on mixed-state entanglement measures. In 2015 he joined Alex Rimberg’s lab at Dartmouth College, where he studied the cavity-embedded Cooper pair transistor: an ultrasensitive electrometer that can operate at the single-photon level. After receiving his PhD, he joined Qulab in September 2021 to work on quantum error correction with the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill code.

Pavel Kurilovich

Pavel was born in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in the heart of the Ural mountains. He came to Yale after receiving an MSc in theoretical physics in Moscow. Having worked on a few theory projects at Yale, Pavel switched to doing experiments. Now he is working on investigating the interplay of superconductivity, spin-orbit interaction, and Coulomb repulsion in semiconducting weak links. Pavel is also interested in the physics of non-equilibrium quasiparticles in superconductors.

Sumeru Hazra

Sumeru grew up in Kolkata (a city in eastern India) and its suburbs. He received his BSc degree in Physics from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Following this, he moved to Mumbai in 2014 to enrol in the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) integrated MSc-PhD program. He joined R. Vijay’s lab in TIFR in 2016 to learn about superconducting quantum circuits. His PhD thesis focused on the engineered interaction between multi-modal circuits and transmons. He also explored coupling-bus designs to increase qubit connectivity beyond nearest neighbours. He joined Qlab in August 2022 to work on optimizing the high-power readout of superconducting qubits.

Charlotte Bøttcher

Charlotte grew up in Odense, Denmark and received her BSc degree in physics from the Niels Bohr institute in Copenhagen with her thesis work focused on studying the superconductor-insulator transition in superconductor-semiconductor Josephson junction arrays. She then moved to the US and finished her PhD in physics at Harvard University with Amir Yacoby, here working on hybrid material systems at the intersection between quantum information and quantum sensing. Her thesis work centered on using cQED techniques to study unconventional superconductivity in 2D materials and mesoscopic samples of superconductor-ferromagnet bilayer. After finishing her PhD, she joined Qulab in September 2022 and is continuing her interest in hybrid systems, now working on proximitized nanowires for realizing novel Andreev spin qubits.

Rodrigo Cortiñas

Rodrigo was born and raised in Lomas de Zamora, a suburb of the Argentine capital. He studied Physics at the University of Buenos Aires, where his final undergrad project was on single optical photon quantum optics in the LOFT lab (Claudio Iemmi). He then moved to Paris, France to work in the cavity QED team of the LKB lab (Serge Haroche, Jean-Michel Raimond, and Michel Brune) on the development of Rydberg atoms technology for quantum simulation. They were the first team to laser trap circular Rydberg atoms (and for >10ms!), an achievement for which Rodrigo was awarded a PhD in atomic physics from the ENS (PSL). He then moved to Yale and joined Qlab to work on quantum error correction in circuit QED. Rodrigo is interested in the fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics and how to harvest them.

Alessandro Miano

Alessandro Miano received a M.Sc in Electronics Engineering in 2017 with a thesis on ferromagnetic Josephson junctions for memory applications. He is currently a Ph.D student in Physics at University of Naples “Federico II”. He joined Qulab in 2019 as a Visiting Assistant in Research, working on the enhancement of Josephson nonlinearities tunability in SNAIL Parametric Amplifiers.

Wei Dai

Wei was born in Shanghai, China. He received his undergraduate degree in physics from Tsinghua University in Beijing. At Tsinghua, he worked with Luyan Sun on superconducting microwave cavity design and Purcell filtering of cQED systems. During the summer of 2017, he worked on in-fridge infrared shielding during an internship with Adrian Lupascu at University of Waterloo. Wei joined Qulab in the fall of 2018. His current study focuses on quantum-limited parametric amplifiers based on SNAILs.

Spencer Diamond

Spencer was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. In 2014, he received his BA in Physics from Dartmouth College. He taught high school Physics for three years before beginning his PhD studies and joining QuLab in the fall of 2017. He currently works on experiments probing quasiparticle dynamics in transmon qubits.

Alec Eickbusch

Alec grew up in Austin, Texas. He attended the University of Texas at Austin where he received B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics. While at UT, Alec worked in the Raizen Lab studying graphene oxide. In summer 2017 Alec joined Qulab, and he is currently working on quantum error correction for superconducting cavities.

Akshay Koottandavida

Akshay was born in Kerala, India. He received his Bachelors and Masters in Physics from UM DAE- CEBS. He worked on nonreciprocal optomechanical devices using superconducting circuits for his masters thesis under Tobias Kippenberg at EPFL. He also worked on topological phenomena in open quantum chains under Franco Nori at RIKEN, Tokyo and before that he interned at Wolfram Research. Akshay joined QLab in the fall of 2018. His current work focuses on quantum error correction using pair-cats.

Vidul Joshi

Vidul grew up in the cities of Nasik and Pune, India. In 2018 he graduated with a BS-MS dual degree in Physics from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. For his Master’s thesis he worked on improving the bandwidth of Josephson Parametric Converters, a class of Josephson parametric amplifiers used for superconducting qubit readout, with Dr. R. Vijayaraghavan at TIFR, Mumbai. He joined Qulab in the fall of 2018 and is now working on improving the power handling capacity and bandwidth of the SNAIL parametric amplifier.

Cassady Smith

Cassady was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada and received her BA in Physics from Whittier College in 2020. During an internship in 2019, she studied mechanical and optical properties of thin-film mirror coatings for gravitational wave detectors at the University of Glasgow. Before starting her PhD at Yale, she worked for a year in the Atomic Clocks Technologies group at The Aerospace Corporation. Cassady now works on the pair-cat error correcting code.

Heekun Nho

Heekun was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota but grew up near Seoul, Korea. In 2021, he received his BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Seoul National University. While there, he worked on the design of superconducting resonators. In 2019, He also worked on developing 3d Rydberg atom systems in KAIST. He is currently working on quasiparticle dynamics in transmons.

Gautham Umasankar

Gautham grew up in Chennai, India. He graduated with dual degrees in electrical engineering and quantum science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2022. He worked with Dr. R. Vijay in the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) Mumbai, as a master’s thesis student. His thesis focused on the optimisation of fixed-frequency superconducting quantum processors, with a focus on the error-budget of the cross-resonance gate. He is currently working on engineering higher order non-linearities in superconducting circuits.

Max Schäfer

Max grew up in the suburbs of Stuttgart, Germany. He received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in physics from ETH Zurich. While at ETH, he worked on 2D materials with Prof. Atac Imamoglu and superconducting resonators with Prof. Klaus Ensslin. For his master’s thesis, Max conducted research in Prof. Oskar Painter’s group at Caltech, focusing on the coherent control of TLS in transmons. By embedding transmons in phononic bandgap metamaterials, the group achieved TLS lifetimes of over 5ms. Max joined Qlab to work on Kerr-cat qubits.