Blog

Benjamin van Osch successfully defended his Master’s thesis on August 7th, entitled “Toward Automated Tuning and Charge-State Characterization of Accumulation-Mode Silicon Quantum-Dot Devices”. Benjamin has made many contributions to our lab over the past two years as an MSc student, and also prior to that as an undergraduate research assistant. Benjamin will be joining the Salfi group at UBC, with whom we collaborate, to continue his journey doing research on semiconductor quantum devices. We wish Benjamin the best of luck in his PhD and look forward to continuing to work with him through the pan-Canadian Consortium on hole spin qubits. 

Prof. Baugh and his team have been awarded supplemental funding to expand their project on Next-generation photonic source to enable quantum remote sensing and communications. The project develops tiny semiconductor devices that are controlled electrically as on-demand single photon sources. The team’s work focuses on building and testing these on-demand photon sources for future use in secure communications, quantum sensing, and precision measurement. The supplemental funding extends the project toward light at telecom wavelengths—the same range used in fibre-optic networks. Baugh and his team will focus on making these semiconductor devices more practical by controlling how many photons are emitted and exploring operation at higher temperatures. This work also strengthens collaborations with the National Research Council (NRC) and Defense Research and Development Canada (DRDC) on real-world testing and training.

See the link here for more information. 

New paper out! It is on designing controls for spin qubits that are robust to 1/f charge noise. Congrats to PhD student Bohdan Khromets for getting these results published in PRA as a Letter, which was also chosen as an Editor's Suggestion. Here is a link to the paper. 

Bohdan also attended the Silicon Quantum Electronics workshop in Davos, Switzerland in September, where he presented a poster on the same work. 

New paper out! Lead by PhD student Zach Merino, this paper demonstrates enhanced photoresponse of InGaAs infrared photodetectors using plasmonic semiconductor nanocrystals. The work was in collaboration with the group of Pavle Radovanovic in Chemistry, lead by his PhD student Gyorgy Jaics.

Congratulations to Fiona Thompson, Andrija Paurevic and Camille Lacroix for successfully defending their Master’s theses in September. All three defences went very smoothly, were well received and generated interesting discussions. Grateful for their contributions to our group's research. Thesis titles are given below:

Fiona Thompson: "Proximity Superconductivity in Indium Arsenide Two-Dimensional Electron Gas Devices"
Andrija Paurevic: "Automated Tuning and Optimal Control of Spin Qubits in Quantum Dot Devices"
Camille Lacroix: "Development and Electronic Characterization of Graphene-Based Hall Effect Devices"

Fiona Thompson, a Master's student in our group, has won this year's David Johnston Award for Scientific Outreach for her community involvement and outreach efforts in enhancing public understanding of quantum research. Here is a link to the award announcement. Congratulations Fiona!

The project Next-generation photonic source to enable quantum remote sensing and communications will use cutting-edge semiconductor device engineering to develop novel, on-demand sources of single photons. These sources will have unique capabilities, such as tunability between one- and two-photon emission, and can be scaled to on-chip arrays. This project also includes Baugh’s co-PIs Dr. Michael Reimer, faculty member at IQC and professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Dr. Zbig Wasilewski, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Dr. Francois Sfigakis, a research associate at IQC; as well as partnerships with Defence Research and Development Canada, the National Research Council Canada, and General Dynamics Land Systems - Canada.

The project Towards large-scale spin qubit quantum computers: simulation, modeling and experiment is led by Dr. Lan Wei, with Baugh and Dr. Youngki Yoon as co-PIs. The project is in partnership with NanoAcademic Technologies Inc. It aims to advance the state of the art in silicon quantum computing devices based on electron spin qubits. 

See this link for the IQC announcement: https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/news/nserc-alliance-grants-2024-recognize-five-quantum-projects

From left, Francois Sfigakis, Annelise Bergeron,
Zbig Wasilewski, Jonathan Baugh

Annelise successfully defended her thesis, entitled “Development of III-V Semiconductor Surface Quantum Wells for Hybrid Superconducting Device Applications”, on Jan. 23, 2024. Congratulations Annelise!

Annelise’s work has focused on the development of InAs and InSb two-dimensional electron gas systems as platforms for topological qubits. She has worked in close collaboration with the QNC-MBE group of Prof. Wasilewski and with Dr. Francois Sfigakis in our group. Her original contributions have resulted in a first-author publication in Appl. Phys. Lett. 122, 012103 (2023) as well as another forthcoming paper.

We have several openings for Masters and PhD students to begin in Fall 2024. Students will engage in cutting edge research on semiconductor-based quantum devices. Key projects include:

• Development of scalable spin qubit processors in silicon. Please see this link for more details!
• Next-generation quantum light sources using tailored semiconductor nanoelectronic devices. Please see this link for more details!

If you are interested in this field and have a background in Physics, Engineering Physics, Chemistry or Electrical Engineering, please contact Prof. Baugh (baugh@uwaterloo.ca).

Two postdoctoral positions are open for an exciting multidisciplinary project at the intersection of quantum transport and quantum optics. This is a collaborative project between Prof. Baugh's group and the group of Prof. Michael Reimer, both at the Institute for Quantum Computing. Please see this link for details, and forward to anyone who may be qualified and interested in a position!