Sergei Studenikin

Adjunct Faculty; Principal Research Officer, NRC

Sergei Studenikin

Dr. Sergei Studenikin holds a position of a Principal Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada, Security and Disruptive Technologies Center located in Ottawa. Simultaneously he is an adjunct professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo. Currently he is working on fundamental properties of single electron and hole spins isolated in semiconductor quantum dot (QD) devices for quantum computing and quantum communications.

Dr.  Studenikin graduated from Novosibirsk State University, City of Novosibirsk, Russia, in 1981.  He received his Ph.D. degree in physics of semiconductors and dielectrics from the Institute of Semiconductor Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia, in 1987.  In 1987-1996 he worked in the Institute of Semiconductor Physics as a Research Scientist and a Senior Research Scientist.  Simultaneously he held a part time assistant professor position in the Novosibirsk State University serving as a lecturer.

In 1996, he accepted a research position in Guelph University, Guelph, ON, Canada, where he accomplished a series of pioneering works on physical properties of ZnO and other metal oxide films.  In 2001, he joined the National Research Council of Canada.   His is currently holding a position of a Principal Research Officer (since 2019) at NRC and Adjunct Professor (since 2006) at the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the University of Waterloo.

Contact information
Email: sergei.studenikin@nrc.ca
Websites: Google Scholar | Researchgate

Projects available for graduate students

We are seeking graduate (MSc. or PhD) students to work on experimental single-hole qubit physics for future quantum computing and secure communication technologies. The work will be performed on the state-of-the-art experimental facilities in the Quantum Physics (QP) Group at the National Research Council campus located in Ottawa. Interested candidates should contact Dr. Sergei Studenikin directly.

The QP Group works on fundamental aspects of single electron and hole spins isolated in gated semiconductor quantum dot (QD) devices. Spin qubits isolated in gated quantum dots are excellent candidates for scalable quantum computing technologies because of their natural compatibility with the state of the art microelectronics industries who gradually become interested in quantum technologies. Most of the worldwide work so far has been carried out with electron spins. Single hole gated QD devices have just recently become available and are attracting considerable interest, due to fascinating new fundamental physics and the many advantages that holes are predicted to possess for quantum technologies over electron spins.

A few words about holes. An absence of an electron in a fully filled semiconductor valance band can be treated as a positive quasiparticle, i.e. a hole, like air bubbles in water, which can move and possess spin. Holes have very different properties when compared to conduction band electrons. One of the advantages of holes is that they have reduced hyperfine contact interaction with nuclear spins (a major source of decoherence in electron spin qubits), resulting in longer hole spin coherence times, the key characteristic of qubits. Valance band holes possess much stronger spin-orbit coupling resulting in enhanced spin related properties such as much faster quantum gate operations that is important to make many quantum gates during coherence time. Recently we demonstrated experimentally that hole g-factor (i.e. the Zeeman spin splitting) can be made electrically tunable, an extremely useful property for scalable qubit circuits and new functionalities (for more details see Studenikin, et al. "Electrically tunable effective g-factor of a single hole in a lateral GaAs/AlGaAs quantum dot," Nature Communications Physics, vol. 2, p. 159, 2019/12/13 2019).

The successful candidate will participate in on-going experimental research of quantum coherent properties of few spin hole quantum dot devices at milli-Kelvin temperatures. Candidates who are interested in theoretical or combined theory/experimental research of the above systems are also welcome.

Required Skills

The candidates are required to be familiar with Solid-State, Semiconductor, Quantum Physics, and Quantum Information concepts. It would be considered an asset if candidates are familiar with: (i) low-noise electrical measurements; (ii) low-temperature cryogenics; (iii) some programming experience in Python.