The Government of Ontario announced Michal Bajcsy, Guo-Xing Miao, Michael Reimer and Na Young Kim, all faculty members at the Institute for Quantum Computing and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, as winners of Early Researcher Awards.
These IQC researchers are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in quantum communication and quantum information processing. Their work in developing fault-tolerant quantum computing and ways for quantum processors to communicate remotely helps drive Ontario as a world-class leader of the second Quantum Revolution.
Assistant Professor Michal Bajcsy designs and fabricates nanophotonic structures for generation, detection, manipulation and storage of single photons on a chip. His work will lead to novel devices for quantum information processing based on single photons acting as flying qubits connecting the nodes of a quantum network.
Creating efficient, large-scale quantum technologies calls for fault-tolerant quantum information processing platforms. Toward this end, Assistant Professor Guo-Xing Miao aims to engineer high-quality, wafer-sized topological materials for use in nanodevices that generate Majorana fermions. Every two pairs of these fermions produce one qubit—the core processing unit of a quantum computer. Quantum information processing on this platform is innately immune to quantum errors, overcoming the main obstacle to the scale-up and commercialization of quantum technologies.
Assistant Professor Michael Reimer is working to develop super-efficient quantum light sources at the nanoscale for secure communication and overcome the present challenge of tuning two sources to the same energy. This capability is an essential building block of a quantum repeater that will extend the distance of quantum communication beyond what is possible today. These devices will also process quantum information using on-chip photonic circuits, and link quantum processors in a network via single photons.
Vulnerability to sources of error means that quantum computers need resource-intensive error correction protocols. Associate Professor Na Young Kim is building a scalable, controllable solid-state quantum simulator to study the underlying principles of topological quantum materials for fault-tolerance, enabling the creation of robust quantum computers.
Previous winners of the Early Research Award at IQC include: Kyung Choi, Vadim Makarov, Jonathan Baugh, Andrew Childs, Joseph Emerson, Thomas Jennewein, Adrian Lupascu, Matteo Mariantoni, Michele Mosca, Ashwin Nayak and Kevin Resch.