ZOOM LINK
Meeting ID: 950 0794 1272
Passcode: 074105

Quantum science and technology hold the promise to deepen our understanding of the universe and deliver groundbreaking technical innovations. The opportunity also poses a grand challenge to today’s scientists and engineers because initializing, controlling, manipulating, and measuring quantum information while maintaining coherence and entanglement can be very difficult. Therefore, successfully achieving breakthroughs will require an interdisciplinary approach that leverages resources from various disciplines to forge new pathways that cannot be defined by a singular field of study.

In this colloquium, I will share my interdisciplinary adventure through quantum material and quantum device landscapes. We will start from the study of fundamental characteristics of Dirac and topological materials, discussing first how their remarkable properties manifest in Josephson junctions. We will then focus on how we utilize the material physics to invent single-photon detectors, which can operate as optical interconnects for cryogenic computing, probe the quantum state of the photon, and contribute to the search for dark matter axions. We will further explore how to utilize the novel properties of two-dimensional van der Waals materials to miniaturize qubits and develop quantum-noise-limited amplifiers. And finally, we will turn around to apply what we have learned from quantum sensing to study electron hydrodynamics and the pairing symmetry of novel superconductivities, including magic-angle-twisted graphene and topological Weyl superconductors. We will end by elucidating how to harness the kinetic inductance of these novel superconductors for future flight-missions to explore planetary science and the origins of life.