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The Quantum Computing Technologies (QCT) group at the Institute for High Energy Physics (IFAE) in Barcelona offers a PhD position within the project AVaQus (Annealing-Based Variational Quantum Processors) funded by the FET Open EU program and coordinated by IFAE . Project AVaQus aims at building a small-scale coherent quantum annealer that is programmable and addresses relevant real-life problems. The project represents an important step towards the consolidation of quantum annealing to become an established quantum computing technology, made in Europe.

We congratulate our group leader, Dr. Pol Forn-Díaz , on receving the prestigious Ramón y Cajal fellowship by the Spanish Ministries of Universities, and Science and Innovation. The award is given to young researchers to aid them consolidate their early-stage careers at a public Spanish research institution. With this award, Dr. Forn-Díaz will continue to establish the QCT group at IFAE and extend its network of collaborators. The fellowship will start in 2021 and will last 5 years, including a research budget.

Despite the current situation due to COVID-19, which unfortunately did not allow for everyone’s attendance, we recently celebrated the 3rd year of existence of our interinstitutional Quantic group. Found in 2017 on June 1st as a collaboration between Universitat de Barcelona (UB) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), the Quantic group has expanded and now includes also the Institut de Fisica d’Altes Energies (IFAE), where we are currently setting up our quantum computing laboratory.

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.

For the 5th time, IFAE offers, through its Summer Fellowship Programme, 12 undergraduate students the possibility to work on a real-world physics problem. Two projects for the month-long programme are available in our Quantum Computing Technology group. One will focus more on the hardware side, in our case superconducting quantum circuits, while the other will be related to quantum software. More information on the programme, available projects and the application process can be found here: https://summerfellowships.

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.

The newly established Quantum Computing Technologies (QCT) group at the Institute for High Energy Physics (IFAE) in Barcelona is looking for a Project Manager Assistant to support the administrative/scientific coordination of the QCT group projects and the Scholarship Management of the Projects Management Department. The main tasks for this position are the following: Tasks directly linked to the QCT group: Full support to the Principal Investigator in preparing the proposals submission, at European and national level.

The newly established Quantum Computing Technologies (QCT) group at the Institute for High Energy Physics (IFAE) in Barcelona offers a postdoctoral position within the project SiUCs ( Superinductor-based Quantum Technologies with Ultrastrong Couplings ) funded by the European QuantERA program. The tasks for this position will involve design, fabrication and measurement of superconducting qubit devices coupled to resonator modes to study the physics of this system in regimes of ultrastrong coupling, and its consequences in superconducting-based quantum technologies.