In 1990, a seminar was initiated for QMC (formerly CNAM/CSR) graduate students in order to present their research to the other students, postdocs, and faculty in the Center. In addition to fostering a rich, collaborative environment in which students learn about the breadth and scope of research being done in QMC, the idea of this series is to teach several crucial skills to our students:
1) How to present their research in a clear and time-efficient way to an audience that was not expert in their area of research;
2) How to best answer questions during their presentations;
3) How to ask good questions when in an audience (or interview), in particular about research beyond their own narrow PhD topic.
In this seminar, students submit formalized feedback to each weekly presenter, providing informative information about presentation style, research content and tips for improvement.
Best Speaker Awards
At the end of each term, a cash prize award is given for the best student and postdoc presentations based on class feedback scores. Previous winners are listed here:
2023 (fall) Jared Erb (student), Peter Czajka (postdoc)
2022 (fall) Sungha Baek (student), Keenan Avers (postdoc)
2020 (fall) Shukai Ma
2019 (spring) Rui Zhang (student), Tarapada Sarkar (postdoc)
2018 (fall) Chris Eckberg (student), Jen-Hao Yeh (postdoc)
2015 Paul Syers, Jasper Drisko
2014 Sean Fackler, Paul Syers,
2013 Kevin Kirshenbaum, Kirsten Burson
2012 Baladitya Suri, Kristen Burson
2011 (fall) Sergii Pershoguba, Ted Thorbeck
2011 (spring) Anirban Gangopadhyay, Baladitya Suri
2010 (fall) Christian J. Long, Tomasz M. Kott
2010 (spring) Tomasz M. Kott, Kevin Kirshenbaum
2009 (fall) Arun Luykx, Jen-Hao Yeh
Title: Stable CNOT-gate on inductively-coupled fluxoniums with over 99.9% fidelity
Abstract: In this talk, we present a detailed characterization of two inductively coupled superconducting fluxonium qubits for implementing high-fidelity cross-resonance gates. Our circuit stands out because it behaves very closely to the case of two transversely coupled spin-1/2 systems. In particular, the generally unwanted static ZZ-term due to the non-computational transitions is nearly absent despite a strong qubit-qubit hybridization. Spectroscopy of the non-computational transitions reveals a spurious L C-mode arising from the combination of the coupling inductance and the capacitive links between the terminals of the two-qubit circuit. Such a mode has a minor effect on the present device, but it must be carefully considered for optimizing future multi-qubit designs. Fluxonium qubits offer a promising foundation for quantum information processing due to their long coherence times combined with strong anharmonicity. We demonstrate a 60 ns direct CNOT-gate on two inductively coupled fluxoniums, behaving nearly identically to a pair of transversely coupled spin-1/2 systems. The CNOT-gate fidelity, estimated via randomized benchmarking, reached 99.94%. Remarkably, this fidelity remains above 99.9% for 24 days without recalibration. In comparison with the 99.96% fidelity of a 60 ns identity gate, our data narrows the investigation of non-decoherence-related errors during logical operations down to 2 \times 10^{-4}. This result introduces a robust, high-fidelity two-qubit gate into the “beyond three nines” category for superconducting qubits, further advancing the field.
1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.