Mark Eriksson named Steenbock Professor

This story was originally published by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research

Mark Eriksson, professor of physics, and Mikhail Feldman, professor of mathematics, have been named recipients of UW–Madison Steenbock Professorships.

“This professorship is among the most prestigious and important professorships for researchers at the UW–Madison,” says Cynthia Czajkowski, interim vice chancellor for research. “This recognition is accompanied by discretionary funds to provide recipients the freedom to explore innovative research directions and to explore new approaches to their research areas.”

In the early 1980s, Evelyn Steenbock initiated a program to endow a series of professorships in the natural sciences in honor of her late husband, Harry Steenbock, emeritus professor of biochemistry.

Harry Steenbock (1886-1967) developed an inexpensive method of enriching foods with Vitamin D. His discovery led to the eradication of rickets, the bone-deforming deficiency disease, throughout most of the world. He is also renowned for his discovery of the conversion of carotenes to vitamin A.

Steenbock assigned his patents for advances in human and animal nutrition to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), and accumulated royalties from Steenbock’s patents supplied about half the funds for the Steenbock Memorial Library construction on campus. Steenbock Memorial Library is a primary resource library for the students, faculty and research staff at the UW­–Madison.

The Steenbock Professorship provides research funds to recipients annually for 10 years and honors those faculty who have made major contributions to the advancement of knowledge, primarily through their research endeavors at UW­–Madison, but also as a result of their teaching and service activities.


profile photo of Mark Eriksson
Mark Eriksson

Eriksson, awarded the Steenbock Professorship in the Physical Sciences, was recently chair of the Department of Physics. He joined the UW–Madison physics faculty in 1999 and is a world-leading expert in the development of quantum information systems using solid-state quantum dot qubits.

As department chair, Eriksson promoted the Wisconsin Idea by supporting the department’s role in connecting with audiences all around the state of Wisconsin, including restarting The Wonders of Physics Traveling Show.

Eriksson received a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from UW–Madison in 1992, received his PhD from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Labs.

His research has focused on quantum computing, semiconductor quantum dots and nanoscience. He leads a team dedicated to developing spin qubits in gate-defined silicon quantum dots with the goal of enabling quantum computers, which manipulate information coherently, to be built using many of the materials and fabrication methods that are the foundation of modern, classical integrated circuits.

Eriksson is widely recognized for engaging collaborative partnerships with industry, government leaders and other university research institutions to tackle some of the greatest challenges in quantum information science and technology. Last year, the Eriksson group announced its partnership with Intel and HRL Laboratories as part of the LPS Qubit Collaboratory (LQC) national Quantum Information Science Research Center hosted at the Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park to collaborate on research in advanced computer technologies.

“I intend to use the award to explore new opportunities in silicon-based quantum computing, including new ideas for connecting qubits to each other across large distances, and the use of near-atomic-scale metamaterials to endow semiconductors with properties even better suited to quantum computing than those available today,” Eriksson says.

DARPA Researchers Highlight Application Areas for Quantum Computing

This post is modified from one originally published by DARPA

Amid efforts to explore quantum computers’ transformative potential, one foundational element remains missing from the discussion about quantum: What are the benchmarks that predict whether tomorrow’s quantum computers will be truly revolutionary? In 2021, DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking program kicked off with the goal of reinventing the metrics critical to measuring quantum computing progress and applying scientific rigor to often unsubstantiated claims about quantum computing’s future promise.

Six months into the second phase of the program, five teams have highlighted research findings focused on specific applications where quantum computing might make outsized impact over digital supercomputers. Equally important, researchers estimated what size quantum computer is needed to achieve the desired performance and how valuable the computation would be. Pre-prints of these results are available on arxiv.org.

Three teams — University of Southern California, HRL Laboratories, and L3Harris — focused on benchmarks and applications while two other teams — Rigetti Computing and Zapata Computing — estimated required quantum computing resources. MIT Lincoln Laboratory, NASA, and Los Alamos National Laboratory provided subject matter expertise, software integration, and test and evaluation capabilities.

The HRL team includes UW–Madison physics professor Matt Otten.

To view the pre-print titles, abstracts, and links to the full text, as well as open-source software code developed by the teams, visit: Publications highlighting potential impact of quantum computing in specific applications.

Read the full DARPA story

Mark Saffman part of team awarded in latest round of Research Forward funding

This story was originally published by the OVCR

The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCR) hosts the Research Forward initiative to stimulate and support highly innovative and groundbreaking research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The initiative is supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and will provide funding for 1–2 years, depending on the needs and scope of the project.

Research Forward seeks to support collaborative, multidisciplinary, multi-investigator research projects that are high-risk, high-impact, and transformative. It seeks to fund research projects that have the potential to fundamentally transform a field of study as well as projects that require significant development prior to the submission of applications for external funding. Collaborative research proposals are welcome from within any of the four divisions (Arts & Humanities, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences), as are cross-divisional collaborations.

Physics professor Mark Saffman is part of a team awarded funding in Round 4 of the Research Forward competition for their project:

Quanta sensing for next generation quantum computing

Future quantum computers could open new scientific and engineering frontiers, impacting existential challenges like climate change. However, quantum information is delicate; it leaks with time and is prone to significant errors. These errors are exacerbated by imperfect reading and writing of quantum bits (qubits). These challenges fundamentally limit our ability to run quantum programs, and could hold back this powerful technology. Fast and accurate qubit readout, therefore, is essential for unlocking the quantum advantage. Current quantum computers use conventional cameras for reading qubits, which are inherently slow and noisy.

This research project will use quanta (single-photon) sensors for fast and accurate qubit readout. Quanta sensors detect individual photons scattered from qubits, thus enabling sensing qubits at 2-3 orders of magnitude higher speeds (few microseconds from ~10 milliseconds), thereby transforming the capabilities (speed, accuracy) of future quantum computers, and for the first time, paving the way for scalable and practical quantum computing.

Principal investigator: Mohit Gupta, associate professor of computer sciences

Co-PIs: Mark Saffman, professor of physics; Swamit Tannu, assistant professor of computer sciences; Andreas Velten, associate professor of biostatistics and medical informatics, electrical and computer engineering

MSPQC’s Preetham Tikkireddi wins second place at QED-C student poster presentation

MSPQC student Preetham Tikkireddi won second place for his poster, “Understanding security side channel attacks on multi-tenancy quantum computers,” at the plenary meeting of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), held March 20-21 in Evanston, IL.

Students who attended the plenary first learned best practices for presenting their research to a non-science audience, a useful skill for a cutting-edge field where investors, hiring managers, and policy makers do not necessarily have a quantum background. Then, the students implemented those skills at the judged poster session.

“[The poster session attendees] are really smart people, but they’re not quantum people, so you set them up for asking questions, and based on the questions that they’re asking, you determine how deep you want to go into your research.” Tikkireddi says. “It was a very different kind of experience, rather than just a plain research presentation to a professor or people who already know the field.”

a group of people in business attire stand and pose in a line, they all have nametag lanyards around their necks
A total of 17 students presented posters at the first-ever QED-C student program and poster competition. UW–Madison MSPQC student Preetham Tikkireddi (right) was one of three graduate students to win the top honor at the competition. | Photo credit: QED-C

Tikkireddi’s research, conducted with computer sciences professor Swamit Tannu, looked at the potential for exploiting crosstalk when two users access the same quantum computer at the same time.

“Right now, quantum computers are really expensive, and the way we access them is by sending jobs to these quantum providers like IBM or IonQ,” Tikkireddi explains. “But the queues are really long. If you’re lucky, you can get the results back the next day.”

Quantum computing capacity is growing rapidly in the form of more and more qubits, and most jobs submitted to these long queues do not need to use all the qubits. Tikkireddi and Tannu thought that one way to increase throughput would be to allow users to share the same quantum computer, each using a subset of the qubits. But quantum computations rely on qubit entanglement, where physically separate qubits interact and share information. It was unclear if sharing a quantum computer opens users to security risks.

In his work, Tikkireddi asked if he could count C-NOTs — the gate that is used to create this entanglement — of another user. He entangled two qubits, then asked if two other qubits could “hear” what the first two were doing.

“We were able to use that to figure out how many C-NOTs the other guy is doing. That’s step one of an attack,” Tikkireddi says. “Your algorithm is your intellectual property, so you don’t want people to steal it. It’s a security problem.”

With this initial analysis identifying potential security risks amongst shared quantum computer use, Tikkireddi says providers should currently not let users share computing time, and that future research should focus on ways to mitigate these crosstalk attacks in an effort to balance efficiency with safeguarding intellectual property.

Tikkireddi credits Tannu for helping to guide his poster away from a traditional research poster and toward one more accessible to a non-science audience. He also appreciates the support from MSQPC associate director Katerina Moloni for encouraging and preparing students to take advantage of these training opportunities.

“It was a really good networking opportunity, especially for me, who is looking for a job right now,” Tikkireddi says. “I would highly recommend students to go to these kinds of events because we get a chance to interact with people in the industry.”

Bringing the Quantum to the Classical: A Hybrid Simulation of Supernova Neutrinos

By Daniel Heimsoth, Physics PhD student

Simulating quantum systems on classical computers is currently a near-impossible task, as memory and computation time requirements scale exponentially with the size of the system. Quantum computers promise to solve this scalability issue, but there is just one problem: they can’t reliably do that right now because of exorbitant amounts of noise. 

So when UW–Madison physics postdoc Pooja Siwach, former undergrad Katie Harrison BS ‘23, and professor Baha Balantekin wanted to simulate neutrino evolution inside a supernova, they needed to get creative.  

profile photo of Pooja Siwach
Pooja Siwach

Their focus was on a phenomenon called collective neutrino oscillations, which describes a peculiar type of interaction between neutrinos. Neutrinos are unique among elementary particles in that they change type, or flavor, as they propagate through space. These oscillations between flavors are dictated by the density of neutrinos and other matter in the medium, both of which change from the core to the outer layers of a supernova. Physicists are interested in how the flavor composition of neutrinos evolve in time; this is calculated using a time evolution simulation, one of the most popular calculations currently done on quantum computers.  

Ideally, researchers could calculate each interaction between every possible pair of neutrinos in the system. However, supernovae produce around 10^58 neutrinos, a literally astronomical number. “It’s really complex, it’s very hard to solve on classical computers,” Siwach says. “That’s why we are interested in quantum computing because quantum computers are a natural way to map such problems.” 

profile photo of Katie Harrison
Katie Harrison

This naturalness is due to the “two-level” similarities between quantum computers and neutrino flavors. Qubits are composed of two-level states, and neutrino flavor states are approximated as two levels in most physical systems including supernovae.  

In a paper published in Physical Review D in October, Siwach, Harrison, and Balantekin studied the collective oscillation problem using a quantum-assisted simulator, or QAS, which combines the benefits of the natural mapping of the system onto qubits and classical computers’ strength in solving matrix equations. 

In QAS, the interactions between particles are broken down into a linear combination of products of Pauli matrices, which are the building blocks for quantum computing operations, while the state itself is split into a sum of simpler states. The quantum portion of the problem then boils down to computing products of basis states with each Pauli term in the interaction. These products are then inputted into the oscillation equations.

a graph with 4 neutrino traces in 4 colors
Flavor composition (y-axis) of four supernova neutrinos over time due to collective oscillations, calculated using the quantum-assisted simulator. The change in flavor for each neutrino over time shows the effect of neutrino-neutrino interactions.

“Then we get the linear-algebraic equations to solve, and solving such equations on a quantum computer requires a lot of resources,” explains Siwach. “That part we do on classical computers.”  

This approach allows researchers to use the quantum computers only once before the actual time evolution simulation is done on a classical computer, avoiding common pitfalls in quantum calculations such as error accumulation over the length of the simulation due to noisy gates. The authors showed that the QAS results for a four-neutrino system match with a pure classical calculation, showcasing the power of this approach, especially compared to a purely quantum simulation which quickly deviates from the exact solution due to accumulated errors from gates controlling two qubits at the same time. 

Still, as with any current application of quantum computers, there are limitations. “There’s only so much information that we can compute in a reasonable amount of time [on quantum computers],” says Siwach. She also laments the scalability of both the QAS and full quantum simulation. “One more hurdle is scaling to a larger number of neutrinos. If we scale to five or six neutrinos, it will require more qubits and more time, because we have to reduce the time step as well.” 

Harrison, who was an undergraduate physics student at UW–Madison during this project, was supported by a fellowship from the Open Quantum Initiative, a new program to expand undergrad research experiences in quantum computing and quantum information science. She enjoyed her time in the program and thinks that it benefits students looking to get involved in research in the field: “I think it’s really good for students to see what it really means to do research and to see if it’s something that you’re capable of doing or something that you’re interested in.” 

trace of neutrino flavor composition over time comparing a quantum simulation to a full classical one
Flavor composition of a neutrino over time using a full quantum simulation (red points) compared to exact solution (black line). The points start to drift from the exact solution after only a few oscillations, highlighting how noise in the quantum computer negatively affects the calculation.

 

Welcome, Professor Matthew Otten!

profile photo of Matt Otten
Matthew Otten

Atomic, molecular and optical and quantum theorist Matthew Otten will join the UW–Madison physics department as an assistant professor on January 3, 2024. He joins us most recently from HRL Laboratories. Prior to HRL, Otten earned his PhD from Cornell University, and then was the Maria Goeppert Mayer fellow at Argonne National Laboratory.

Please give an overview of your research.

Very generally, my goal is to make utility scale quantum computing a reality, and to get there faster than we would otherwise without my help. We have a lot of theoretical reasons to believe that quantum algorithms will be faster in certain areas; in practice, we need to know how expensive it’s going to be. It could be that a back of the envelope calculation says a quantum computer might be better, but because quantum computers are very expensive to build and have a lot of overhead, you could find that once you crunch the numbers really carefully, it turns out to cost more money or more energy or more time than just doing it on a supercomputer. In that case, it’s not worth the investment to build it, or at least not at this point. Part of my research is to understand and develop quantum algorithms and count how expensive they are. Once you do that, you can figure out the reason it’s so expensive is A and B. Then we go and we try to fix A and B, and then whack-a-mole all these bottlenecks down and eventually you go from, “It’ll never work,” to “Okay, it’ll work in twenty years.”

Another part of my research is looking at the physical qubits. These devices all have a lot of deep physics inside of them. If you just look at it from the quantum algorithm level, you might get so far. But if you dig down and try to understand the underlying physics, I think you can get further. You might be able to make devices cheaper, faster, or more performant in general. I do a lot of simulations of the underlying physics of these various types of qubits to understand what their properties are, what causes the noise that ruins computation, and what we can do to fix that noise. Through simulations on classical computers, sometimes very large ones, we come up with ways to tweak the system so that you get better performance, by coming up with better quantum algorithms and better qubits. Put those together and hopefully you get to a better quantum computer.

Once you arrive in Madison, what are one or two research projects you think your group will focus on first?

I’ll be bringing a few projects with me. The first is part of a DARPA program called Quantum Benchmarking, which I was part of while at HRL. We found really high-value computational tasks, not specifically quantum, that Boeing, which owns HRL, would like calculated: for instance, reducing corrosion. Corrosion causes planes to be grounded for maintenance, which is costly. Reducing corrosion will reduce maintenance costs and increase uptime. We’ve been developing ways to ask and answer the question, how close are today’s quantum computers to solving that problem? How big do quantum computers need to be to solve that problem? The specific task is understanding what it takes to solve such a large-scale problem, counting the quantum resources that are necessary and coming up with tests so that you could go to a quantum computer, run the tests, and hopefully be able to predict how much bigger or how much faster they would need to be to solve the problem.

Another one comes from the Wellcome Leap Foundation. We are trying to do the largest, most accurate calculation of biological objects — a molecule, string of carbon, something like this — possible on a real-life quantum computer. We’re trying to take techniques that have already been developed or develop new techniques to make circuits smaller, which means a less expensive quantum computer, and faster. That one is a competition, they gave us funding to do it, but if we complete the task better than other competitors, we get more funding to do more.

What attracted you to UW­–Madison?

The strength of the science that’s happening in the physics and broader Wisconsin community is very attractive. When I visited, everyone was very nice, it’s a very collegial department. And being from St. Louis, I like the Midwest. I’ve lived in Southern California for a couple of years now and I haven’t seen snow, and that’s sad. Madison is a lovely area. Great people.

What is your favorite element and/or elementary particle? 

I think it has to be silicon. Silicon is used in classical computing and potentially has use in quantum computing. And you’re carrying around silicon right now, just like everyone else.

What hobbies and interests do you have? 

I have a Siberian Husky puppy and we’ll be very happy to go to Madison and do a lot of skijoring, which is cross country skiing, but the dog pulls you. I started running recently and I was jazzed up for my first half marathon and then I got COVID and I didn’t do it, so I’m still jazzed up for my first half marathon. I play a lot of board games and have a very large board game collection. And my daughter just turned one. She’s become a new hobby.

Ben Woods and team named finalists in 2023 WARF Innovation Awards

Each fall the WARF Innovation Awards recognize some of the best inventions at UW–Madison. WARF receives hundreds of new invention disclosures each year. Of these disclosures, the WARF Innovation Award finalists are considered exceptional in the following criteria:

  • Has potential for high long-term impact
  • Presents an exciting solution to a known important problem
  • Could produce broad benefits for humankind

One of the six finalists comes from Physics. Research Associate Benjamin Woods and a team including Distinguished Scientist Mark Friesen, John Bardeen Prof. of Physics Mark Eriksson, Honorary Associate Robert Joynt, and Graduate Student Emily Joseph developed a quantum device that shows a significant increase in valley splitting, a key property needed for error-free quantum computing. The device features a novel structural composition that turns conventional wisdom on its head.

Two winners, selected from the six finalists, will be announced in WARF’s annual holiday greeting; sign up to receive the greeting here. Each of the two Innovation Award winners receive $10,000, split among UW inventors.

“Sandwich” structure found to reduce errors caused by quasiparticles in superconducting qubits

Qubits are notoriously more prone to error than their classical counterparts. While superconducting quantum computers currently use on the order of 100 to 1000 qubits, an estimated one million qubits will be needed to track and correct errors in a quantum computer designed for real-world applications. At present, it is not known how to scale superconducting qubit circuits to this size.

In a new study published in PRX Quantum, UW–Madison physicists from Robert McDermott’s group developed and tested a new superconducting qubit architecture that is potentially more scalable than the current state of the art. Control of the qubits is achieved via “Single Flux Quantum” (SFQ) pulses that can be generated close to the qubit chip. They found that SFQ-based control fidelity improved ten-fold over their previous versions, providing a promising platform for scaling up the number of qubits in a quantum array.

profile photo of Robert McDermott
Robert McDermott
profile photo of Vincent Liu
Vincent Liu

The architecture involves a sandwich of two chips: one chip houses the qubits, while the other contains the SFQ control unit. The new approach suppresses the generation of quasiparticles, which are disruptions in the superconducting ground state that degrade qubit performance.

“This structure physically separates the two units, and quasiparticles on the SFQ chip cannot diffuse to the quantum chip and generate errors,” explains Chuan-Hong Liu, PhD ’23, a former UW–Madison physics graduate student and lead author of the study. “This design is totally new, and it greatly improves our gate fidelities.”

Liu and his colleagues assessed the fidelity of SFQ-based gates through randomized benchmarking. In this approach, the team established operating parameters to maximize the overall fidelity of complex control sequences. For instance, for a qubit that begins in the ground state, they performed long sequences incorporating many gates that should be equivalent to an identity operation; in the end, they measured the fraction of the population remaining in the ground state. A higher measured ground state population indicated higher gate fidelity.

Inevitably, there are residual errors, but the reduced quasiparticle poisoning was expected to lower the error rate and improve gate fidelities — and it did.

four panels showing the new chip architecture. The two on the left just show the two computer chips, and then the top right panel shows them "sandwiched" on top of each other. The bottom right panel is a circuit diagram of the whole setup.
The quantum-classical multichip module (MCM). (a) A micrograph of the qubit chip. (b) A micrograph of the SFQ driver chip. (c) A photograph showing the assembled MCM stack; the qubit chip is outlined in red and the SFQ chip is outlined in blue. (d) The circuit diagram for one qubit-SFQ pair. | From Liu et al, PRX Quantum.

“Most of the gates had 99% fidelity,” Liu says. “That’s a one order of magnitude reduction in infidelity compared to the last generation.”

Importantly, they showed the stability of the SFQ-based gates over the course of a six-hour experimental run.

Later in the study, the researchers investigated the source of the remaining errors. They found that the SFQ unit was emitting photons with sufficient energy to create quasiparticles on the qubit chip. With the unique source of the error identified, Liu and his colleagues can develop ways to improve the design.

“We realized this quasiparticle generation is due to spurious antenna coupling between the SFQ units and the qubit units,” Liu says. “This is really interesting because we usually talk about qubits in the range of one to ten gigahertz, but this error is in the 100 to 1000 gigahertz range. This is an area people have never explored, and we provide a straightforward way to make improvements.”

This study is a collaboration between the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Syracuse University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and UW–Madison.

This work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (DMR-1747426); the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) Accelerator; Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA-20001-D2022-2203120004); and the NIST Program on Scalable Superconducting Computing and the National Nuclear Security Administration Advanced Simulation and Computing Beyond Moore’s Law program (LLNL-ABS-795437).

Partnerships bring together UW–Madison quantum computing research, industry leaders

Two leading companies in semiconductor quantum computing are partnering with researchers at the University of Wisconsin­–Madison, itself a long-time academic leader in quantum computing.

UW–Madison’s separate partnerships with Intel and HRL Laboratories are part of a first round of collaborations announced June 14 by the LPS Qubit Collaboratory (LQC), a national Quantum Information Science Research Center hosted at the Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS). Established in support of the National Quantum Initiative Act, LQC is facilitating partnerships between industry and academic and national labs to advance research in quantum information science.

“These collaborations are great examples of UW–Madison partnering with industry on the development of important technologies, in this case semiconductor quantum computers,” says physics professor Mark Eriksson, the UW–Madison lead on the partnerships.

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Finding some wiggle room in semiconductor quantum computers

a geometric pattern of lines in green, light gold, and black/dark purple, representing the qubit

Classical computers rarely make mistakes, thanks largely to the digital behavior of semiconductor transistors. They are either on or they’re off, corresponding to the ones and zeros of classical bits.

On the other hand, quantum bits, or qubits, can equal zero, one or an arbitrary mixture of the two, allowing quantum computers to solve certain calculations that exceed the capacity of any classical computer. One complication with qubits, however, is that they can occupy energy levels outside the computational one and zero. If those additional levels are too close to one or zero, errors are more likely to occur.

“In a classical computer, all the aspects of a transistor are super uniform,” says UW–Madison Distinguished Scientist Mark Friesen, an author on both papers. “Silicon qubits are in many ways like transistors, and we’ve gotten to the stage where we can control the qubit properties very well, except for one.”

That one property, known as the valley splitting, is the buffer between the computational one-zero energy levels and the additional energy levels, helping to reduce quantum computing errors.

In two papers published in Nature Communications in December, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of New South Wales and TU-Delft showed that tweaking a qubit’s physical structure, known as a silicon quantum dot, creates sufficient valley splitting to reduce computing errors. The findings turn conventional wisdom on its head by showing that a less perfect silicon quantum dot can be beneficial.

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