The Micius Quantum Prize in 2021 was awarded to superconducting quantum research
On March 2, The Micius Quantum Prize in 2021 was announced. This year's award field is the observation of quantum effects in superconducting devices. There are three winners:
John Clarke, the University of California, Berkeley
Michel H. Devoret, Yale University
Yasunobu Nakamura , RIKEN
The reason for the three awards is "leadership in creating superconducting quantum circuits and quantum bits." Each winner will receive 1.25 million yuan (about 150000 US dollars after-tax) in cash and an honorary medal sponsored by the Mozi quantum foundation.
Introduction to winners
John Clarke
John Clarke was born in 1942. He received his bachelor's degree and doctor's degree from Cambridge University in 1964 and 1968. He is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
He has made great contributions to superconductivity and superconducting electronics, especially in the development and application of squid (superconducting quantum interference device). Squid is an ultra-sensitive magnetic flux detector, which plays a key role in cutting-edge science and technology fields such as nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, quantum basic research, cold dark matter search, and so on. His team also observed the quantization of energy levels in mesoscopic systems for the first time: they experimentally confirmed that a single Josephson junction has discrete energy levels just like atoms.
Michel H. Devret
Michel H. devret was born in 1953. She received her bachelor's degree and doctor's degree from the Higher Institute of telecommunications in Paris and the eleventh University of Paris in 1975 and 1982 respectively. She is now a professor at Yale University. His main research fields are experimental solid-state physics, especially cavity quantum electrodynamics, quantum electronics, quantum computing and the physics of superconducting circuits in quantum sensing. He has made important contributions to quantum information processing using superconducting circuits.
Yasunobu Nakamura
Nakamura Taixin was born in 1968. He received his bachelor's degree and doctor's degree from the University of Tokyo in 1990 and 2011. He is now a professor at the Japanese Institute of science and Chemistry (RIKEN).
His main research interests are quantum electronics in superconducting circuits and hybrid quantum systems, with particular attention to the manipulation and measurement of quantum states in electronic and optical devices. In 1999, he and his collaborators demonstrated the coherent control of qubits in solid-state electronic devices.
Background: a brief history of superconducting quantum circuits
The development of superconducting quantum circuits can be traced back to more than 40 years ago. In the early 1980s, Leggett proposed an experiment to test whether macro collective variables can show quantum mechanical behavior: he questioned the traditional Copenhagen explanation that the world is divided into microsystems subject to quantum mechanics and classical macro systems, including measuring instruments. In particular, Leggett proposed that the macroscopic collective variable represented by the phase difference of Josephson tunnel junction is essentially the integral of the voltage on Josephson tunnel junction; Therefore, the effectiveness of quantum mechanics can be fully tested at the macro level. In the process of establishing two coherent macroscopic states, Leggett first found an important intermediate step: macroscopic quantum tunneling (MQT) - the collective macroscopic variable passes through an energy barrier.
In 1980, at the University of California, Berkeley, Koch, van Harlingen and John Clarke proved theoretically that the white noise of resistance shunt Josephson junction is limited by the quantum fluctuation of current passing through a shunt resistor, which is a macro collective electric variable, which is treated by quantum mechanics according to Leggett's idea.
Then, still in Berkeley in 1984, devoret, Martinis, Esteve and Clarke invented the concept of resonant activation in the current biased Josephson junction. This technology allows the experimental results of MQT to be compared with Caldeira Leggett’s theory without fitting parameters for the first time, thus eliminating possible artifacts.
In 1985, Martinis, devoret and Clarke proved the quantization of energy levels in current biased Josephson junctions; In the same year, devoret, martinis and Clarke proved that MQT followed Leggett's theory and all relevant parameters were measured in situ under the classical limit.
In 1997, the devoret team of the University of Sacre in Paris (including esteve) realized the Cooper pair box later known as the charge qubit, and showed that its ground state was a quantum superposition of the charge state; The team pointed out that the circuit constitutes a superconducting qubit. In the same year, at NEC, Taixin Nakamura's team observed the anti crossing of energy levels of superconducting single-electron transistors in the microwave spectrum as evidence of the superposition of charge states.
In 1998, Taixin Nakamura, pashkin and Chua zhaoshen again proved the Rabi oscillation between the ground state and excited state of the Cooper pair box by using the Cooper pair quasi-particle cycle at NEC. This experiment awakened the condensed matter physics community and made them aware of the possibility of superconducting qubits with controllable dynamics.
In 2002, devoret team proved Ramsey fringes and Rabi oscillations in qubits by increasing the coherence time of Cooper's box by two orders of magnitude. In terms of quantum information language, this achievement completes the complete single-qubit control of the Bloch sphere.
After that, the family of superconducting qubits continued to grow. In addition to charge qubits and quantumnium, it now includes flux qubits, phase qubits, transmon and fluxonium.
In the past 25 years, the coherence time of superconducting qubits has increased by six orders of magnitude, making it an attractive candidate for large-scale quantum computing. The most commonly used superconducting device design is based on transmon qubits and circuit quantum electrodynamics, which was developed by Schoelkopf, Girvin, devret and their colleagues at Yale.
The pioneering research led by John Clarke, Michel H. devret and Taixin Nakamura laid the foundation for the enrichment and rapid development of superconducting quantum circuits. In order to commend this series of work, the jury finally decided to award them The Micius Quantum Prize in 2021.
About The Micius Quantum Prize
In the past few decades, people have made profound progress in the understanding of new information processing methods using quantum superposition and entanglement and the experimental methods of coherent control and interaction of single quantum particles, which gave birth to a new field of quantum technology, also known as the second quantum revolution, Beyond the first quantum revolution, the pure use of naturally occurring quantum effects. The second quantum revolution is promoting and realizing the impossible tasks of a new generation of classical devices, from unconditional and secure quantum communication, super-powerful quantum simulation and quantum computing, to extremely sensitive measurement.
In the past few decades, people have made profound progress in the understanding of new information processing methods using quantum superposition and entanglement and the experimental methods of coherent control and interaction of single quantum particles, which gave birth to a new field of quantum technology, also known as the second quantum revolution, Beyond the first quantum revolution, the pure use of naturally occurring quantum effects. The second quantum revolution is promoting and realizing the impossible tasks of a new generation of classical devices, from unconditional and secure quantum communication, super-powerful quantum simulation and quantum computing, to extremely sensitive measurement.
The foundation established the Micius Quantum Prize, which strictly selects and commends international scientists who have made outstanding contributions in the fields of quantum communication, quantum simulation, quantum computing and quantum precision measurement through extensive invitation and nomination and international expert evaluation.
So far, the Micius Quantum Prize has been awarded four times, commending the significant scientific progress from early concept contribution to recent experimental breakthrough.
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