Details
Speaker Name/Affiliation
Steve Girvin / Yale Quantum Institute
When
-
Seminar Type
Location (Room)
JILA Auditorium
Event Details & Abstracts
Abstract: The Schrödinger Cat idea was an early thought experiment intended to point out the weirdness of quantum mechanics. It is a paradigmatic example of the quantum principles of superposition and entanglement. With the vast experimental progress in the last two decades, we can now routinely carry out this experiment in the laboratory. In this pedagogical talk, I will present a ‘quantum signal processing’ recipe for how to create a Schrödinger Cat in a system consisting of a superconducting microwave resonator (a harmonic oscillator) and a superconducting qubit (a two-level artificial atom). Extensions of this recipe now allow us to create even more exotic states of microwaves that can be used as quantum error correction codes.
Bio:
After graduating in a high school class of 5 students in the small village of Brant Lake, New York and completing his undergraduate degree in physics from Bates College, Dr. Girvin earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton University in 1977.
Dr. Girvin joined the Yale faculty in 2001, where he is Sterling Professor of Physics and Professor of Applied Physics. From 2007 to 2017 he served as Yale’s Deputy Provost for Research, overseeing strategic planning for research across Yale. From 2019 to 2021, he served as founding director of the Co-Design Center for Quantum Advantage, one of five national quantum information science research centers funded by the Department of Energy.
Along with his experimenter colleagues Michel Devoret and Robert Schoelkopf, Professor Girvin co-developed ‘circuit QED,’ the leading architecture for construction of quantum computers based on superconducting microwave circuits.
Dr. Girvin is a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is a co-winner of the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society for his work on the fractional quantum Hall effect. In 2019, he and coauthor Kun Yang published the textbook “Modern Condensed Matter Physics” with Cambridge University Press.
The Physics Frontiers Centers (PFC) program supports university-based centers and institutes where the collective efforts of a larger group of individuals can enable transformational advances in the most promising research areas. The program is designed to foster major breakthroughs at the intellectual frontiers of physics by providing needed resources such as combinations of talents, skills, disciplines, and/or specialized infrastructure, not usually available to individual investigators or small groups, in an environment in which the collective efforts of the larger group can be shown to be seminal to promoting significant progress in the science and the education of students. PFCs also include creative, substantive activities aimed at enhancing education, broadening participation of traditionally underrepresented groups, and outreach to the scientific community and general public.