Ahmed Hajr is a 5th year PhD student in Applied Science & Technology (AS&T) working in the Quantum Nanoelectronics Laboratory of Professor Irfan Siddiqi. His research focuses on strong light-matter interaction in superconducting quantum circuits. Ahmed obtained his B.S. in Physics from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, during which he worked on computational spintronics doing tight-binding simulation of heterostructures.
Superconducting quantum circuits are a rich platform to stabilize and control fascinating states of microwave photons with rapid progress in applications related to quantum computing. However, current noisy devices require improvements by orders of magnitude to realize the full potential of quantum algorithms. Therefore, in my PhD, I have been contributing to the advancement of this field by improving the materials used in those circuits, and to novel schemes of encoding and manipulating quantum information. More specifically, I have been working on the Kerr-Cat qubit which is a noise-biased qubit realized by applying a squeeze drive (i.e. a two-photon drive) to a Kerr-nonlinear oscillator.
By working with strongly driven systems, I developed an intuition for engineering efficient, strong nonlinear light-matter coupling which I am going to extend to novel schemes of encoding and manipulating quantum information. I aim to harness efficient nonlinear driving to engineer Kerr-Cat qubits with larger nonlinearities and realize high-fidelity entangling operations between Kerr-Cat qubits. Finally, I plan to extend some of the engineering ideas to more traditional circuits like the transmon oscillator to realize a noise-biased qubit.