Speaker
Description
The fabrication efforts of the COSMIQ group are focused on creating superconducting aluminum doped with manganese (Al/Mn) gap engineered films/circuits to utilize their low-band gap for both quantum sensing and computing purposes. Environmental radiation and cosmic rays produce phonons in substrates that can then cause Cooper pairs to break producing quasiparticles (QPs). With precise gap engineering of superconducting films and circuits we can create a handle on the QP population in our devices to serve computing and sensing purposes. For computing, gap-engineered Josephson Junctions (JJs) have shown to improve coherence times in qubits. By incorporating a circuit with a lower superconducting band gap than the JJ leads, we can further funnel QPs away from the junctions to further reduce QP poisoning. The reverse of this scheme can be incorporated to create a qubit device more sensitive to QPs to be utilized as a physics sensor either directly or through a qubit-coupled quantum acoustics detector. The quantum acoustics device uses a low superconducting band gap downconverter to convert higher-energy phonons into resonant phonons that are then coupled to a qubit via a piezo-electric transducer for readout.
