February 19, 2026
Day in the Life of a Quantum Engineer!
EQuS postdoc Holly Stemp takes us along with her for the day, to show what a typical day looks like for a quantum engineer in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.
Shoumik and collaborators’ manuscript, “Theory of quasiparticle generation by microwave drives in superconducting qubits,” was selected for a special issue of Physical Review Applied in honor of the International Year of Quantum!
This collection, Quantum Frontiers, highlights research that spans fundamental discoveries to real-world implementations and comprises a curated collection of the top quantum articles in the journal Physical Review Applied. Congratulations to Shoumik and all co-authors with the MIT EQuS Group and MIT Lincoln Laboratory!
Shoumik, Max, and collaborators’ manuscript, “Theory of quasiparticle generation by microwave drives in superconducting qubits,” was published as an Editors’ Suggestion in Physical Review Applied!
Microwave drives play a central role in controlling and measuring superconducting qubits, and are typically assumed by the superconducting qubit community not to disturb the superconducting material itself. In this work, we present theory and numerical simulations indicating that this assumption does not hold under strong driving. We show that multiple microwave drive photons can still combine to break Cooper pairs and generate quasiparticles (QPs) in superconducting devices, resulting in qubit decoherence. We apply our theory to several next-generation superconducting circuit architectures, compute lifetime limits due to multiphoton-assisted quasiparticle generation, and suggest strategies to mitigate this new loss mechanism.
Congratulations to Shoumik and all co-authors with the MIT EQuS Group and MIT Lincoln Laboratory!
See also: Editors’ Selection from Physical Review Applied
December 6, 2025
Happy Holidays from EQuS!
As we bring this productive year to a close, we express our sincere appreciation to our sponsors, partners, and collaborators for their steadfast support, as well as to every member of EQuS and our colleagues at MIT Lincoln Laboratory for their dedication and contributions. Your collective efforts have been instrumental in all that we have accomplished.
We were delighted to celebrate these achievements together at our holiday gathering at Glass House, where families, friends, and the EQuS community enjoyed an evening of good food, great company, and music by the Harmonic Modes, our very own lab band. One of the highlights of the evening was a surprise visit from Jeff Grover as the holiday Bluefors fridge!
As we look forward to 2026, we send our warmest wishes for a joyful holiday season and a New Year filled with new opportunities, continued learning, and shared success.
December 4, 2025
Lamia Ateshian successfully defended her PhD thesis!
EQuS graduate student, Lamia Ateshian, successfully defended her PhD thesis on December 4, 2025! Lamia joined the group in 2021, and her graduate studies were supported by the Doc Bedard Fellowship, the NSF GRFP Fellowship, and the Alan L. McWhorter Fund Fellowship. Lamia’s thesis, titled “Probing the Magnetic-Field Dependence of Noise in Superconducting Qubits,” explored the properties of the intrinsic noise that limits the coherence of superconducting qubits. In the first main experiment, Lamia applied in-plane magnetic fields to flux qubits and used noise spectroscopy techniques to explore the noise trends, revealing previously unobserved behavior in the ubiquitous 1/f magnetic flux noise. In the second experiment, she investigated the magnetic-field and temperature dependence of flux and charge noise in a fluxonium qubit. These works offer experimental characterizations that should inform future microscopic theories of intrinsic noise in superconducting qubits.
After EQuS, Lamia will join Google Quantum AI as a Research Scientist. Congratulations, Lamia!
November 24, 2025
Sarah Muschinske successfully defended her PhD thesis!
EQuS graduate student, Sarah Muschinske, successfully defended her PhD thesis on November 24, 2025! Sarah joined the group in 2020, and her graduate studies were supported by a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship. Sarah’s thesis focused on the development of arrays of transmon qubits for quantum simulation applications. To mitigate issues in planar devices such as crosstalk and line crowding, Sarah designed and simulated 16- and 21-qubit arrays into a 3D-integration fabrication process. These devices enabled experiments that probed the nature of entanglement entropy in many-body systems and realized synthetic magnetic fields, and they could eventually study interesting condensed matter phase transitions.
After EQuS, Sarah will join AWS Center for Quantum Computing as a Research Scientist. Congratulations, Sarah!
October 30, 2025
Superconducting circuits are among the most promising building blocks for quantum computers. Yet today’s leading designs—transmons and fluxoniums—still suffer from environmental noise that causes qubits to lose information. A central challenge is creating qubits that are naturally protected from both “bit-flip” errors (where a 0 turns into a 1) and “phase-flip” errors (where the coherence of a superposition is lost). We introduce a new qubit design, which we call the “harmonium,” that tackles this challenge by carefully engineering the quantum energy landscape of the circuit. Instead of relying on a single periodic potential, harmonium combines two different “harmonics” of the Josephson energy, corresponding to tunneling of Cooper pairs one-by-one and two-by-two, respectively. Together, these harmonics produce two stable, nondegenerate wells. The quantum states of the qubit are confined to separate wells, which suppresses bit-flip errors, while a symmetry between the wells suppresses phase-flip errors.
Congratulations to Max and all co-authors!
We present and experimentally implement a real-time protocol for calibrating the frequency of a resonantly driven qubit, achieving exponential scaling in calibration precision with the number of measurements. We show the efficacy of the algorithm by stabilizing a flux-tunable transmon qubit, leading to improved coherence and gate fidelity, and resilience to non-Markovian noise. Our protocol highlights the importance of feedback in improving the calibration and stability of qubits subject to drift and can be readily applied to other qubit platforms.
This work was a collaboration between the Niels Bohr Institute, MIT, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Leiden University. Congratulations to Fabrizio, Lukas, Melvin, and all co-authors!
This work was also featured in a news article from the Niels Bohr Institute.
Dr. Holly Stemp awarded the UNSW Malcolm Chaikin Prize!
Dr. Holly Stemp, a current Postdoctoral Associate in the EQuS group, was awarded this year’s Malcolm Chaikin prize for Research Excellence in Engineering for her PhD thesis carried out at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. This prestigious prize is awarded annually to the doctoral student who is judged to have produced the best PhD thesis in the UNSW Faculty of Engineering.
Holly’s PhD research was on the topic of donor atom spin qubits in silicon. Her thesis entitled “Entangling electrons and nuclei in a four-qubit, two-atom device in silicon” focused on coupling remote donor nuclei by using the exchange interaction between donor-bound electrons to mediate the nuclear interaction.
In her current role at EQuS, Holly is working on a project to couple distant quantum dot spin qubits via a superconducting qubit coupler. Congratulations, Holly!
July 22, 2025
Aziza Almanakly successfully defended her PhD thesis!
EQuS graduate student, Aziza Almanakly, successfully defended her PhD thesis on July 22, 2025! Aziza joined the group in 2020, and her graduate studies were supported by the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, the Clare Boothe Luce Fellowship, and the Alan L. McWhorter Fund Fellowship. Aziza’s thesis, titled “Quantum Networking using Waveguide Quantum Electrodynamics,” describes the development of a superconducting quantum interconnect that uses directional photons to generate remote entanglement. The first main experiment realizes a superconducting module which generates on-demand directional emission of microwave photons by exploiting quantum interference. In the second experiment, Aziza builds an interconnect comprising two modules and generates remote entanglement using directional photon emission and absorption. This work enables a quantum network architecture with all-to-all connectivity for modular, distributed quantum computation.
Aziza will continue as a postdoctoral researcher in EQuS until September 2026, after which she will begin her appointment as an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University. Congratulations, Aziza!
July 11, 2025
While large-scale quantum computation will likely require error correction, current leading implementations using superconducting qubits can be limited by correlated errors. We show that 17% of these correlated errors can be attributed to cosmic-ray muons impacting the qubit chip. As these cosmic rays are challenging to shield against without operating in deep underground laboratories, this work highlights the need to engineer the qubits themselves to be insensitive to radiation. To this end, we observe that chip-level design choices can affect a qubit’s response to particle interactions.
This work was a collaborative effort between MIT EQuS, Joe Formaggio’s group, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Congratulations to Pat and all co-authors!
June 16, 2025
This paper describes an experiment where we used a quantum computer to study how particles move through a flat-band material. Materials with flat electronic band structures have attracted intense interest following the recent discovery of superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene. We used 10 superconducting qubits to emulate a tight-binding model on the rhombic lattice, and we added a synthetic magnetic field using a method we previously demonstrated in Nature Physics 20, 1881-1887 (2024). A key advantage of our approach is the ability to easily reprogram the quantum computer to tune the band structure—something that is extremely difficult to achieve in real materials. Depending on the synthetic magnetic field, the rhombic lattice exhibits between 1 and 3 flat bands. This control allowed us to systematically study the competing effects of disorder, interactions, and band flatness, and to observe how their interplay influences conductivity.
Congratulations to Ilan Rosen, and all co-authors in the MIT EQuS Group!
June 5, 2025
Max Hays Hosts ChileMass Delegation!
Max Hays recently gave a presentation on quantum computing to members of the Chile Massachusetts Alliance, followed by a guided tour of our new lab facilities.
The Chile Massachusetts Alliance (ChileMass) is a Cambridge-based nonprofit that strengthens collaboration between Chile and Massachusetts in the areas of science, technology, and innovation. The organization brings together companies, startups, universities, investors, and local communities to launch joint projects, programs, and partnerships across both regions.
Despite progress towards achieving low error rates with superconducting qubits, error-prone two-qubit gates remain a barrier to realizing larger-scale quantum computers. Baseband-control is commonly used to realize two-qubit phase gates. However, the gate fidelity depends heavily on the precise shape of the baseband pulse, and imperfections lead to phase errors and leakage out of the computational basis. In this work, we use a signal-processing approach to design the pulse shape. We investigate a Chebyshev-based trajectory as an alternative to the widely used Slepian-based trajectory and explore the relative advantages. Results show that the Chebyshev-based trajectory can be designed to achieve lower leakage error and infidelity in certain cases.
Congratulations to Andy Ding, and all co-authors in the MIT EQuS Group, the Digital Signal Processing Group, and Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories!
May 29, 2025
Congratulations to the 2025 EQuS Graduates!
Congratulations Harry Kang, Junghyun Kim, David Pahl, and Lukas Pahl, who all earned their Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science based on research performed in the EQuS group.
The masters theses are on the topics:
- Harry Kang: “Investigation of Two Qubit Gates between Remote Spin Qubits using a Superconductor Coupler”
- Junghyun Kim: “Design and Engineering of Protected Superconducting Qubits”
- David Pahl: “Simulation and Design of Quantum Processors for Low-Overhead Quantum Error Correction”
- Lukas Pahl: “Calibratoin and Control of Superconducting Qubits for Low-Overhead Quantum Error Correction”
All four will continue their work as PhD students in EQuS. Please join us in congratulating Harry, Junghyun, David, and Lukas!
May 21 – 30, 2025
Professor Will Oliver teaches at Benasque Science Center in Benasque, Spain!
Professor Will Oliver gave two lectures at the Benasque Science Center’s Spring School on Superconducting Qubit Technology. Expert speakers from universities, research institutes, and corporations around the world were invited to speak on a broad range of subjects from the basics to the specific techniques required to design, fabricate, and operate quantum devices based on superconducting circuits.
April 23, 2025
Spin qubits confined in quantum dots are promising candidates for quantum computation, but a significant challenge is the dense wiring required to control quantum dots situated extremely close together.
To overcome this limitation, we have proposed using a charge-sensitive superconducting circuit, known as the offset-charge-sensitive (OCS) transmon, as a coupler that entangles distant spin qubits. We investigated two distinct ways of implementing a CZ gate: a rapid, off-resonant pulse for quick interactions and a more tailored pulse, using pulse-envelope engineering, with dynamical decoupling to mitigate the effects of charge noise on spin qubits. Time-domain simulations demonstrated that these strategies can achieve gate fidelities exceeding 90% under realistic conditions.
This research represents an important step towards leveraging the strengths of superconducting circuits in spin-based quantum computing.
Congratulations to Harry and all co-authors with the MIT EQuS Group!
March 21, 2025
In this work, we construct a quantum interconnect by using a waveguide to connect two superconducting, multi-qubit modules. We emit and absorb microwave photons on demand and in a chosen direction between these modules using a quantum interference effect. To optimize the emission and absorption protocol, we implement a reinforcement learning algorithm to shape the photon for maximal absorption efficiency. By halting the emission process halfway through its duration, we generate remote entanglement between modules in the form of a four-qubit W state. This quantum network architecture enables all-to-all connectivity between non-local processors for modular, distributed, and extensible quantum computation.
Congratulations Aziza Almanakly, Beatriz Yankelevich, and all co-authors with the MIT EQuS Group and MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
This was also featured in MIT News
March 18, 2025
Quantum systems slowly lose information to their environments over time in a process called decoherence. The physics of decoherence is of fundamental interest, and its study often inspires strategies to increase the coherence of state-of-the-art devices.
In this work, we report the first observation of a basic feature of qubit decoherence: oscillations in the purity of a qubit state arising from the asymmetry of its transverse noise environment. Although such asymmetric noise environments are common across leading experimental platforms including superconducting qubits, neutral atoms, and trapped ions, purity oscillations are overlooked by typical models of decoherence. This work confirms our understanding of decoherence on the timescale set by the qubit frequency, and can inspire new techniques to disentangle charge and flux noise in low-frequency superconducting qubits.
Congratulations, David and all co-authors with the MIT EQuS Group and MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
February 5, 2025
In this study, we probe the superfluid stiffness of magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) using circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED). By integrating a MATBG sample into a superconducting quarter-wave resonator, we track its frequency shift as a function of Fermi energy, temperature, and bias current. This approach provides crucial insights into the pairing symmetry and the role of quantum geometry in MATBG and other correlated superconductors.
Understanding the mechanisms of unconventional superconductivity is one key to advancing quantum materials research and unlocking new applications. Our work introduces a new platform to explore atomically thin superconductors in both the DC and microwave regimes—a step forward for fundamental physics and future quantum technologies.
Congratulations, Miuko Tanaka, Joel Wang, and all co-authors with the MIT EQuS Group, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and the Jarillo-Herrero Group.
This was also featured in MIT News
January 15 – 16, 2025
The 2025 Quantum Science and Engineering Consortium (QSEC) Annual Research Conference (QuARC) was held at the beautiful Omni Mount Washington resort in New Hampshire. Over 200 people attended this year’s conference! Highlights included student pitches and poster sessions where the latest results from MIT research were presented. The winners for each pitch and session were selected by MIT faculty and researchers.
EQuS graduate student Hung-Yu Tsao won a best poster award for his poster, “Stencil Mask-Enabled Fabrication for Superconducting Qubits.”
EQuS postdoc Doug Pickney and graduate student Qi (Andy) Ding both won best pitch awards for their poster pitches, “Examining the Effect of Various Radioactive Sources on Superconducting Qubits Protected Through Gap-Engineering” and “Frequency-Modulated Microwave Drives for Single- and Two-Qubit Gates.”
Congratulations Hung-Yu, Doug and Andy! Also, special thanks to Beatriz Yankelevich, Sameia Zaman and other QuARC committee members for organizing this event!
January 10, 2025
Professor Will Oliver teaches at KAIST-MIT Quantum Winter School
Professor Will Oliver gave a plenary talk and two lectures at the 2025 KAIST-MIT Quantum Winter School. The Quantum Winter School involves undergraduates from KAIST, SNU, and other universities across South Korea. The aim is to advance quantum information science and technology, and it serves to support increased engagement between the KAIST and MIT. Lectures were also given by Prof. Kevin O’Brien (MIT), Prof. Soonwon Choi (MIT), and Prof. Paola Cappellaro (MIT). Thanks to Prof. Eunseong Kim for organizing this fantastic winter school! From left to right: Prof. Eunseong Kim (Chair, Graduate School of Quantum Science and Technology, KAIST), Prof. Kwang Hyung Lee (President of KAIST), Prof. Kevin O’Brien (MIT), and Prof. Will Oliver (MIT).