Image of a phonon-engineered superconducting qubit.
A team of eleven investigators at LBNL led by Assistant Professor Alp Sipahigil have been awarded $8,000,000 by DOE to develop ultrahigh frequency phononics for next generation superconducting quantum technologies.
Superconducting integrated circuits are a leading platform for building quantum processors and sensors that outperform their classical counterparts. Further advances in these emerging technologies require improvements in our understanding and control of how superconducting circuits interact with vibrations in solids called phonons. The PhononNext Center at LBNL will bring together experts in atom-to-devices modeling, synthesis and nanofabrication, superconducting detectors, and quantum devices. The team will combine their expertise to develop multilayers for ultrahigh frequency phononics, and use these multilayers to realize next-generation phonon-engineered quantum sensors, transducers, and qubits.