Professor Gang Qiu receives DARPA Young Faculty Award

Professor Gang Qiu is a recipient of the highly competitive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award (YFA). The award recognizes rising stars in academia whose research shows exceptional promise for advancing Department of Defense (DoD) science and technology priorities. Qiu’s project, titled “Cooling-on-demand using an electron hydrodynamic refrigerator,” seeks to revolutionize cryogenic cooling, currently a key bottleneck in scaling quantum computing hardware.

The overarching goal of the project is to develop a first-in-class electron hydrodynamics (EHD) refrigerator that leverages the fluid-like viscous flow of electrons in ultrapure quantum materials. By emulating the mechanisms of classical fluid-based cooling devices at the millikelvin regime, this novel approach aims to provide a new active cooling principle directly applicable to quantum chips. Qiu’s team will explore how EHD effects can be harnessed to redirect limited cooling power to critical regions—enabling “cooling on demand” for qubit arrays and achieving lower base temperatures with improved energy efficiency.

Quantum computing has emerged as one of the most transformative frontiers in modern science and engineering, promising exponential speedup for various applications. However, the prevailing route for quantum computing—superconducting technologies—requires extreme cooling capabilities near absolute zero temperature to preserve fragile qubit coherence. Traditional millikelvin cooling technologies, such as dilution refrigerators (DRs) and adiabatic demagnetization refrigerators (ADRs), have well-known limitations toward large-scale deployment. Qiu’s proposed EHD refrigerator overcomes these challenges by introducing an electron-based analog to classical fluidic cooling, which, if successful, could significantly reduce decoherence, improve quantum gate fidelity, and accelerate the scalability of next-generation quantum computers.

This project sits at the exciting intersection of quantum materials, cryogenic electronics, and classical fluid mechanics. By mimicking fluid cooling with the collective behavior of electrons, Qiu hopes to uncover entirely new mechanisms of thermal management that can reshape quantum technology. The three-year, $1 million DARPA YFA project will not only deepen the fundamental understanding of electron hydrodynamics but also open pathways for energy-efficient cryogenic systems with broad implications for quantum computing and other DoD-relevant applications.

Learn more about the DARPA Young Faculty Award. 

Professor Gang Qiu earned his PhD from Purdue University in 2019. He joined the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in 2023. Qiu's lab investigates novel low-dimensional materials and nanostructures to expand the frontiers of classical nanoelectronics, cryogenic electronics, and quantum technologies.