An interdisciplinary approach to advance quantum science and technology

Professor K. C. Fong at ECE Spring 2025 Colloquium

Quantum science and technology hold the promise to deepen our understanding of the universe and deliver groundbreaking technical innovations. The opportunity also poses a grand challenge to today’s scientists and engineers because initializing, controlling, manipulating, and measuring the quantum information while maintaining the coherence and entanglement can be very difficult. Therefore, successfully achieving breakthroughs would require an interdisciplinary approach that leverages resources from various disciplines to forge new pathways which cannot be defined by a singular field of study.

In this talk, I will share my interdisciplinary adventure through quantum material and quantum device landscapes. We will start from the study of fundamental characteristics of Dirac and topological materials, discussing first how their remarkable properties manifest in Josephson junctions, and then focus on the material physics that we can exploit to invent single-photon detectors, that can operate as optical interconnects for cryogenic computing, probe the quantum state of the photon, and contribute to the search of the dark matter axion.

We will further explore how to utilize the novel properties of the two-dimensional van der Waals materials to miniaturize qubits and develop quantum-noise-limited amplifiers. And

Finally, we will turn around to apply what we learn from quantum sensing to study the pairing symmetry of novel superconductivities, including the magic-angle-twisted graphene and topological Weyl superconductors. We will end by elucidating how to harness the kinetic inductance of these novel superconductors for future flight-missions to explore planetary science and the origins of life.