Graduate Student Seminar with Kaiwen Zheng on Building a Novel Electron Qubit

A single electron floating in vacuum trapped in a 2D potential well is a simplest quantum system taught in lectures. It turns out that a slightly fancier realization of it has the potential to be the most coherent scalable on-chip qubit. In my talk I’ll describe in detail how we build such a system starting from a silicon wafer and what is the physical mechanism behind matrix operations in this platform. I hope to indirectly shine some light on the challenges in building useful large scale quantum computers through the many incidences where our electron qubit does not work. Meanwhile I would like to convey my optimism in the meanings behind our pursuit by sharing how the effort of building a complex quantum system can lead us to carefully re-examine condensed matter systems that have been studied long before.