In this paper , the authors from the QCT group Elia Bertoldo, Manel Martínez and Pol Forn-Díaz present two approaches for cosmic muon flux attenuation during superconducting qubit measurement. First, they discuss the usage of shallow underground measurement stations to achieve an attenuation of a factor of 35 for 100-meter depths. On the other hand, they also study the impact of chip orientation with respect to the sky, from which they conclude that horizontal orientations receive less energetic particles than vertical configurations.
On Tuesday 3rd of September, Oriol sucessfully defended his Bachelor Thesis titled “Design-driven performance enhancements of superconducting flux qubits”. In this work, Oriol carried out an extensive study of superconducting flux qubits, especially circuit QED theory and their decoherence mechanisms, and presented a possible circuit design to further improve the performace of such qubits. This thesis concludes his BSc in Physics, and Oriol has now moved on to study a Master’s Degree in Quantum Science and Technology at the Universitat de Barcelona.
We welcome our new PhD student, Ariadna Gómez del Pulgar , to our team. Ariadna holds a double Bachelor’s Degree in Physics and Mathematics and a Master’s Degree in Quantum Science and Technologies, all from the Universitat de Barcelona. She has been working at our group for many years, first as an IFAE Summer Fellow, later to undertake her Bachelor Thesis and ultimately to conduct her Master Thesis in superconducting nitridized aluminium.
We welcome our new PhD student, Guillermo del Riego , to our team. Guillermo holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Physics from the Universidad de Oviedo and a Master’s Degree in Quantum Science and Technologies from the Universitat de Barcelona. He worked previously at ICN2 to undertake his Master Thesis, where he studied the effects of graphene intercalation in spin-orbit torque. During the next four years of his PhD, Guillermo will be working on superconducting qubits for quantum annealing applications.
On Monday 2nd of September, Ariadna sucessfully defended her Master Thesis titled “Characterization of nitridized aluminum for quantum computing hardware applications”. She presented an extensive characterization of NitrAl films fabricated during the second half of 2024. Congratulations Ariadna!
Elia Bertoldo attended the first edition of the workshop “Radiation Impact on Superconducting Qubits” (RISQ 2024) hosted at Fermilab (USA). There, he presented the current status of activities and infrastructures at IFAE and at the Laboratorio Subterráneo de Canfranc (LSC) for the research of the impact of ionizing radiation on experiments with superconducting qubits.
Bojos per la Física is an outreach activity for last-year high school students. These activities are organized on Saturday morning and the students get to meet researchers in Physics and know about different research topics. In this ocasion, Luca Cozzolino and Alba Torras-Coloma prepared an activity about Quantum Computing. The students got an introduction to quanutm physics and quanutm computing, they visited the QCT laboratory and finally they were able to implement a quantum algorithm on a real quantum computer.
On Friday 12th of April David López-Núñez successfully defended his PhD thesis on “Coherent Flux Qubits for Quantum Annealing”. Congratulations Dr. López-Núñez!
Luca, Alba, David and Pol traveled to Minneapolis for this year’s edition of the March Meeting. Luca Cozzolino presented in the Quantum Annealing and Quantum Inspired Classical Algorithms his progress on the “Novel readout for Quantum Annealing”. Alba Torras-Coloma also presented her work on “Non-perturbative Ultrastrong Couplings in Superconducting Quanutm Circuits” featured in the Novel Superconducting Qubits session.
In this paper, the authors from the QCT group Alba Torras-Coloma, Elia Bertoldo, David López-Núñez and Pol Forn-Díaz present “NitrAl”, a new superconducting material. The work focusses on the study of the main superconducting properties of nitridized aluminum thin films.