Design, Control and Application of Next Generation Qubits

Arun Bansil, Northeastern University (Principal Investigator)

Claudio Chamon, Boston University (Co-Investigator)

Adrian Feiguin, Northeastern University (Co-Investigator)

Liang Fu, MIT (Co-Investigator)

Eduardo Mucciolo, Univ. of Central Florida (Co-Investigator)

Qimin Yan, Temple University (Co-Investigator)

The quest for developing technologies for manipulating and storing information quantum mechanically is currently led by approaches based on Josephson-junctions, ion-traps, and qubits generated by defect spins in solids. Topological qubits, however, are inherently more robust to decoherence by environmental effects, and should be able to sprint ahead once practical barriers have been overcome. At the present stage of the development of the field, it is important to explore a variety of architectures and materials beyond the conventional paradigms in order to seed breakthroughs toward building a scalable quantum computer. Our comprehensive theoretical research program involves four interconnected thrusts as follows.  

·      A materials discovery effort in two-dimensional compounds in search of materials to support Majorana zero modes and defect structures suitable as qubits. 

·      Exploration of architectures for topological quantum computation by investigating both superconducting Majorana qubits, and robust platforms for braiding with new “meta-materials” built of arrays of Majorana qubits. 

·      Investigation of properties of hybrid metal-organic qubits based on transition-metal centers in graphene, and molecular crystals of polyaromatic complexes with embedded transition-metal atoms.  

·      Development of tensor-network and semiclassical approaches to study decoherence in the presence of random and dispersive spin baths, and NV centers in diamond.  

The full spectrum of theoretical and numerical approaches is being used to address the key problems, including first-principles, density-matrix-renormalization group, tensor networks, and data-driven high-throughput approaches using materials database and machine-learning. Our team combines diverse and complementary skills for the successful completion of the project.