We welcome aboard our this year’s summer interns , Queralt and Raquel, who already started working on their research projects. Queralt Portell is a 3rd year undergraduate student in Physics and Math from UAB and is working on FPGA programming to acquire qubit states faster. Raquel Garcia is in her 4th year of undergraduate studies in Physics and Math likewise at UAB. Her project is on programming scripts to calibrate qubits.
We are pleased to welcome Sara Martínez de Salinas Uzquiza to our growing family. Sara joins IFAE’s Project Management Unit to support our group in the coordination of several European research projects . She holds a PhD in Chemistry from the Universidad de Oviedo and worked previously as PostDoc at the Institut Català d’Investigació Química (ICIQ) in Tarragona.
This month marks the official start the European project SiUCs (Superinductor-based Quantum Technologies with Ultrastrong Couplings), which was succesfully granted in the 2019 QuantERA call. The kick-off meeting is supposed to take place on May 4th, 2020.
The SiUCs project consortium follows a radically new approach to quantum computing: we will harness the potentiality of very large light-matter coupling - often referred to as ultra-strong coupling (USC) - instead of fighting it.
Our group was succesfully granted the coordination of the project AVaQus (Annealing-based VAriational QUantum processorS), one of 49 projects selected by the European Commission to receive the FET-Open grant in the 2019 call. The project consortium brings together European research groups and companies to develop a quantum processor based on superconducting quantum circuits in order to demonstrate coherent quantum annealing and its potential to solve real-life optimization problems.
AVaQus is the first European-funded large-scale project on quantum annealing and it will lead to the consolidation of quantum annealing hardware as a research field in Europe, and potentially as a future European quantum technology.
This week, we had two visitors from Germany at IFAE. On Tuesday, February 18, Ioan Pop from KIT gave a talk on “Ionizing Radiation: A Dominant Source of Non-Equilibrium Quasiparticles in Superconducting Quantum Circuits”. A day later on Wednesday, February 19, Frank Wilhelm from Saarland University presented the European roadmap for quantum computing with his talk “Quantum computing - state of play, prospects, and a European perspective”. We thank both of them for their very interesting presentations!
Today, we welcome Barkay Guttel from Université Grenoble Alpes onboard. He is joining our team to work on superconducting qubits for his Master thesis. Previously, he did his BSc in Physics and Mathematics at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology. His interest is quantum information and quantum computation, more specifically using superconducting qubits.