Zaki Leghtas, Professor at Mines Paris - Laboratoire de Physique de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure
Title: “Quantum control of a cat-qubit with bit-flip times exceeding ten seconds”
Time: Thursday, 27.02., 12:00 h

The Technical University of Munich (TUM) has appointed Dr. habil. Hans Hübl as an Adjunct Professor in recognition of his excellent contributions to both research and teaching. Hans Hübl is a research group leader at the WMI since 2009 and a lecturer at the TUM since 2014. As a member of the excellence cluster MCQST and the Munich Quantum Valley, he makes key contributions to the successful research and teaching program in quantum science and technology. "Congratulations to Hans! I am very happy that again a member of my group was honored with the award of an adjunct professorship", Rudolf Gross, scientific director at WMI says.

The European Research Counsil (ERC) has awarded its Consolidator Grants (CoG) to 328 outstanding scientists in 25 EU Member States with a total budget of 678 million euros. Matthias Althammer was awarded one of these prestigious grants, allowing him to implement his ambitious research project on antiferromagnetic magnonics as a platform for energy-efficient information processing. "I am very happy that Matthias was successful in this highly competitive funding scheme with a total success rate of only 14.2%”, Rudolf Gross, scientific director at WMI, says.

The Max Planck Semiconductor Laboratory (HLL), the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and the Walther Meißner Institute (WMI) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (BAdW) have agreed on a groundbreaking collaboration for the joint development of superconducting quantum bits, or qubits, and quantum processors based on them. This partnership, established within the Munich Quantum Valley (MQV), marks a significant step in the research and advancement of quantum technologies. The collaboration aims to develop superconducting qubits as key components for future quantum computers.
Press Release (German)

In their experiment, researchers at the WMI design and characterize a multimode superconducting quantum circuit that forms an artificial molecule. The circuit has two characteristic nonlinear oscillation modes. One is used as a protected qubit mode that can be efficiently decoupled from the measurement circuit to prevent the loss of quantum information. The second mode is used as a mediator that controls the interaction between the qubit mode and the measurement circuit. This protected multimode qubit has the potential to also suppress unwanted interactions between neighboring qubits, thereby solving another major challenge in scaling up quantum processors. It can thus serve as a building block for a quantum processor architecture that retains the performance of a single qubit at large scale.

As part of the "MOQS – Molecular Quantum Simulations" consortium, researchers at WMI explored the potential of quantum computing to simulate the quantum effects that govern chemical reactions. Their findings suggest that the chemical industry could be among the earliest beneficiaries of advancements in quantum computing. The report was prominently featured as the cover article in the September issue of Physics Today and is available to read online free of charge.