(PI Sauls PROJ0018807) Superconducting Quantum Materials & Systems

The primary mission of the proposed NQI Superconducting Materials and Systems Center (SQMS) is to achieve transformational advances in the major cross-cutting challenge of understanding and eliminating the mechanisms of decoherence in superconducting 2D and 3D devices, with the final goal of enabling construction and deployment of superior quantum systems for computing and sensing. By year five, we aim at demonstrating quantum advantage in both computing and sensing applications with the devices and systems that we will build. These ambitious goals require excellence and beyond the state of the art facilities in many fields: material science, condensed matter physics, radio frequency superconductivity science and engineering, computer science, fundamental particle physics and more. This interdisciplinarity justifies the need for a National Center: by bringing together a diverse team of world class experts and unique facilities from DOE national labs, universities, and industry, and integrating them towards a focused mission, SQMS will enable the achievement of these broad scientific and technological goals. In this proposal we will describe how our approach has the potential to deliver world-leading capabilities in Quantum Information Science: the >100 qubit 2D and 3D quantum processor protypes that we will build will surpass the current state of the art and will be made available via HEPCloud to a wide community to explore their potential impact from physics to finance to societal applications. The record high coherence devices we will build will enable demonstration of the largest “Schroedinger cat state” with 10,000 photons, paving the way towards major advances in quantum communication technology and ultra-secure networks. To pursue fundamental physics questions, we will leverage advances in SRF cavity based quantum technologies to develop sensing schemes capable of detecting single photons that will enable ultra-sensitive experiments to test Beyond the Standard Model theories, and so progress our understanding of the universe at its most fundamental level.