Physics Colloquium: Machiel Blok

The Syracuse University Physics Department is pleased to welcome Machiel Blok, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester.

Machiel Blok received his Ph.D. in physics from Delft University of Technology/QuTech (The Netherlands) where he worked with Prof. Ronald Hanson on defect centers in diamond with a focus on quantum measurement, real-time feedback and remote entanglement. During his postdoc at UC Berkeley, in the group of Prof. Irfan Siddiqi, he developed a qutrit quantum processor in superconducting circuits. In 2020, he joined the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Rochester as an assistant professor, where he started a superconducting circuits lab as the inaugural Levinson/Shapiro Faculty Scholar.

“Beyond Binary Quantum Information: Controlling the Excited States of “Artificial Atoms” in Superconducting Circuits”

Encoding quantum information in the higher energy levels of the transmon circuit provides a resource efficient way to control large Hilbert spaces and to execute quantum algorithms at reduced circuit complexity. Building on recent demonstrations of the first qu-trit quantum processor at UC Berkeley [1,2], here I will discuss ongoing work in our lab at the University of Rochester to explore the transmon spectrum. We demonstrate preparation and readout of Fock states of up to ten microwave photons. Furthermore, we illustrate how the strong Kerr non-linearity of the transmon allows us to implement non-Gaussian operations that are challenging to realize in a linear mode. In the long term, we anticipate this new approach to controlling higher-level quantum information to yield benefits for bosonic quantum error correction and qu-dit simulation.

[1] Quantum Information Scrambling in a Superconducting Qutrit Processor

1. S. Blok et al PRX 11, (2) 021010 (2021)

[2] Qutrit Randomized Benchmarking

1. Morvan et al PRL 126 (21), 210504 (2021)