Aravind Nagulu, assistant professor in the McKelvey School of Engineering, has been awarded a $25,000 Collaboration Initiation Grants from the school.
The program awards one-year grants to projects that facilitate collaborative research outside of and within McKelvey Engineering departments for tenure-track faculty. The grants are a pathway for faculty to apply for larger, interdisciplinary grants, to create a more synergistic project than could be achieved by one researcher in one discipline, and to demonstrate the potential to sustain the collaboration and obtain external funding. Each awardee receives $20,000 from the school and must have $5,000 in cost-sharing from their department or collaborators.
Nagulu, in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, will collaborate with Erik Henriksen, associate professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, and Kater Murch, professor of physics and an affiliate faculty member of electrical & systems engineering and computer science & engineering. The team plans to address the need for compact, low-cost and scalable equipment for control and readout of thousands of quantum bits, or qubits, basic units of information in quantum computing, that would supply future quantum computers. These electronics implemented on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) platforms may be a solution to address various challenges of dense readout and scalability because they can integrate billions of transistors on a single chip. In addition, they plan to develop very low-temperature, cryogenic signal routing lattices based on time modulation to facilitate on-demand quantum transport between two qubits.
