The Hardware of a Quantum Computer

Instructor

Lieven Vandersypen

Professor, QuTech

Delft University of Technology

Lieven Vandersypen is the Director Research on the Board of Directors of QuTech. a Professor at Qutech, Delft University of Technology. He leads a group that focuses on single-spin qubits in semiconductor quantum dots, for applications in quantum computing and quantum simulation.

He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2001, carrying out most of the research at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. As a PhD student, he used the spins of atomic nuclei in a molecule as quantum bits and implemented various quantum algorithms for the first time, demonstrating, most famously, Shor’s quantum algorithm.

He then moved to TU Delft, the Netherlands, first as a postdoc and since 2006 as Antoni van Leeuwenhoek professor. He leads a group that pioneered quantum computing based on electron spins in semiconductor quantum dots, often dubbed “artificial molecules”. Breakthrough results were the ability to trap, initialize, manipulate and read out the spin of single and coupled electrons. He furthermore worked for ten years on a diverse set of experiments using graphene, a layer of graphite just one atom thick. His current interests are to devise and demonstrate novel building blocks of a large-scale quantum dot spin qubit processor and to study many-body physics problems using quantum dot arrays.

Instructor

Menno Veldhorst

Tenure Track Team leader and Roadmap leader at QuTech

Delft University of Technology

Menno Veldhorst is an associate professor at QuTech, Delft University of Technology.

Menno Veldhorst is a pioneer in the field of semiconductor quantum computing. During his postdoctoral research at the University of New South Wales in Sydney he demonstrated for the first time single and two-qubit gates in silicon, recognized by PhysicsWorld as one of the top-ten breakthroughs in physics in 2015. At QuTech, his research group demonstrated many ‘firsts’, such as the demonstration of a planar germanium quantum dot, a single-hole qubit, two-qubit logic in germanium, a four-qubit quantum processor, and a 16 quantum dot system operated with shared control.

Instructor

Koen Bertels

Professor in Computer Engineering

University of Ghent

Koen Bertels is Professor Quantum Computer Engineering at University of Ghent. Previously, he was Professor in Computer Engineering at the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science at Delft University of Techology, where he was responsible for the department Quantum and Computer Engineering.

Koen works on computer engineering aspects of realizing a quantum computer. He is the founder of the company QBee where they defined the full stack for a quantum accelerator, which can be seen as the ultimate heterogeneous co-processor to be added to any modern computer.

Instructor

Leo Di Carlo

Associate Professor and roadmap leader, QuTech

Delft University of Technology

Leonardo DiCarlo is Professor at QuTech, Delft University of Technology. One of his ambitions is to realize full fault-tolerant quantum computing using the surface code, spanning from superconducting quantum hardware, through control electronics, to the complete software stack. This is a great challenge blurring the line between traditional condensed-matter physics and electrical engineering.

He holds a double major in physics and electrical engineering from Stanford University (1999), a Master’s in electrical engineering also from Stanford (2000), and a PhD in mesoscopic physics from Harvard University (2008). Leo’s focus evolved from semi to superconducting electronic systems during his post-doc in applied physics at Yale University (2008-2010). Highlights from this period include the first solid-state quantum processors executing quantum algorithms, generating three-qubit entanglement and performing basic quantum error correction.

Instructor

Attila Geresdi

Tenured team leader, QuTech

Chalmers University of Technology

Attila Geresdi is an assistant professor at Chalmers University of Technology. Previously, he was a Senior Scientist at QuTech. His current research leverages nanoscale superconductivity in hybrid nanodevices to engineer new electronic states, such as topologically protected edge modes. He also investigate novel superconducting quantum bits which are based on Andreev bound states.

Attila holds a summa cum laude PhD for his work on point contact Andreev reflection measurements on magnetic semiconductors and memristive systems at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary. He joined the Delft University of Technology in 2012 as a postdoctoral researcher to investigate nanoscale low dimensional semiconductor systems in pursuit of topological Majorana states. In 2014, he was awarded with the prestigious Veni grant of NWO to develop microwave spectroscopy of Majorana states.

Instructor

Giordano Scappucci

Team leader, QuTech

Delft University of Technology

Giordano Scappucci is team leader of the Quantum Materials Lab at QuTech, Delft University of Technology. Giordano has a multidisciplinary expertise in semiconductors that has enabled him to span the traditional boundaries between materials, chemistry, nanofabrication and physics. Giordano received a MSc in Physics from La Sapienza University (Roma, Italy) in 2000 and a PhD in Physics from Roma TRE University (Roma, Italy) in 2004. In his research, Giordano made high quality Si/Ge epitaxial layers to confine high mobility two-dimensional electron gases in silicon and study quantum phenomena in nanowires transistors. He then moved to Australia to the University of New South Wales, where he contributed to the development of a radical atomic-scale silicon device technology to fabricate devices where dopants are placed in silicon and germanium with atomic precision. Back to Europe in 2015, and back to SiGe heterostructures, the goal if his research group is to tailor the structural and electronic properties of SiGe heterostructures for applications in quantum technologies. He joined QuTech in 2015. His group is a research partner with Intel for the development of a quantum computer in silicon.

Instructor

Tim Taminiau

Team leader, QuTech

Delft University of Technology

Tim Taminiau is a team leader at QuTech, Delft University of Technology. He investigates solid-state spins and their applications for quantum information and physics. His group uses a combination of quantum optics, magnetic resonance and nanoscale fabrication to detect and control individual spins associated with defect centres.

With these controlled systems of coupled spins, Tim’s group aims to answer questions such as: How does decoherence emerge in complex quantum systems? Can we use quantum coherence to realise novel improved sensors? Can we protect quantum states and computations indefinitely so that large-scale quantum computations become possible? Does quantum mechanics continue to accurately describe such extended large-scale quantum systems?

Instructor

Michael Wimmer

Roadmap leader, QuTech

Delft University of Technology

Michael Wimmer is the Qubit Research Division leader at QuTech, Delft University of Technology. He leads the Quantum tinkerer group jointly with Anton Akhmerov. Michael’s research revolves around the field of mesoscopic conductors and superconductors. This includes in particular topological aspects of condensed matter physics, such as topological insulators and superconductors, and Majorana bound states. Numerical simulations play a large role in the work of Michael’s group, which is developing new algorithms that are applicable to performing such simulations.

Previously, Michael was a post-doc in the mesoscopic physics group of Carlo Beenakker in Leiden. He did his PhD with Klaus Richter at the University of Regensburg.