DIscovery of Scalable Qubits On-chip Via photonics and Electromechanical Reconfiguration

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Color centers are central to many quantum technologies, but today it takes years to understand whether a given color center makes a good qubit, and as a result we have discovered very few of them. I will develop an on-chip color center exploration platform that drastically accelerates qubit discovery. Color centers are defects in crystals, such as an atom of a given element substituting one of the crystal atoms. Color centers make good qubits by combining the long coherence of spins, the networking properties of photons, and the scaling of the solid state. For example, photons emitted from distant color centers were used to entangle their spins, advancing quantum communication and confirming the quantum mechanical nature of reality. However, today it takes years and many measurements involving multiple physical principles to assess whether a new color center fits a certain application. In addition, the number of potential candidates is vast, only bound by the number of combinations of atomic elements. This leaves an enormous potential unexplored, limiting our discovered qubits to a small subset with trade-offs in coherence, scalability, and connectivity. DISQOVER will allow unprecedented exploration of the vast search space of color centers, an impossible task for the current technology. This requires highly concerted innovation on tools, designs, methods, and protocols that combine traditionally separated fields. I will develop innovations in integrated photonics and mechanics, fields in which I am an expert, and combine them with local thermal control into an automated qubit discovery platform. With this, I will pursue qubits for quantum computing, transduction, sensing, and amplification. This will kick-start the field of application-specific qubits (ASQs) and transform the technological landscape, leading to breakthroughs in error correction for quantum computers and networks at scale, versatile quantum sensing, and lasing and amplification in silicon.