Physics Colloquium with Hugh Churchill on Making New Qubits

In this talk I will describe a few collaborative efforts between my lab and others to create novel qubits that are fabricated using both old materials and a newer one.  First, I will describe the context of this work against the background of the global effort to create larger and more powerful quantum processors, and then I will discuss two categories of new kinds of qubits that we are developing.  The first one uses materials that have been available for decades (InAs and Ge) to create voltage-controlled superconducting qubits. The second one uses a more recently discovered material (atomically thin WSe2) to create qubits for which the two states used for computation are the so-called valley pseudospin degree of freedom that is available to electrons in certain monolayer crystals.  I will conclude with a brief description of the MonArk Quantum Foundry, a broadly collaborative effort across the US Heartland that aims to accelerate research progress in 2D quantum materials and devices.