Meet Dr. Patrick Harrington
Advisor: Dr. William D. Oliver
Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Bio: Patrick received his Ph.D. in 2020 from Washington University in St. Louis. During his Ph.D., he worked on the control of quantum states using dissipation and measurement dynamics with superconducting circuits. Patrick’s research addresses how interactions at the classical quantum boundary are an essential component of quantum state preparation and readout. He is now an IC Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, where he does research on superconducting qubits and sensors. His work focuses on detecting sources of qubit decoherence from ionizing radiation and quasiparticle loss.
Abstract: Ionizing radiation presents a source of errors for superconducting qubits. Qubit errors events caused by the natural radiation background of the laboratory can be spatiotemporally correlated, which poses a challenge to the extensibility of superconducting qubit quantum processors. We present measurements to detect and quantify sources of error bursts in superconducting qubit quantum processors. These measurements relate qubit errors to the dynamics of quasiparticles, phonons, and sources of ionizing radiation. This research provides insight into error-mitigating device architectures and computation protocols which may overcome the deleterious effects of radiation-induced errors and, in turn, enable practical quantum computation for applications such as cryptography, database search, and optimization problems.