Hossein Taghinejad

2022-2024 Heising-Simons Junior Fellow

Faculty Advisors: Professors Michael Crommie, James Analytis

Before joining Kavli ENSI, Hossein finished his PhD (2020) and masters (2018) in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, with a minor degree in materials science. In October 2020, he started his postdoctoral research in the school of physics at UC Berkeley, joining the Quantum Materials research group led by Prof. James Analytis. Hossein is the recipient of the 2021 Sigma Xi Award, which recognizes the best PhD thesis of the year in Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also the recipient of Career-Research-Innovation-Development Conference (CRIDC) award in 2017 and the best student presentation award from the Materials Research Society (MRS) Conference in 2016.

During his PhD research at Georgia Institute of Technology, Hossein developed a technique that enabled the synthesis of lateral heterostructures with dimensions as small as a few tens of nanometers, in isolated or periodic fashions, in predefined locations, and with tunable material compositions. The developed technique is scalable up to a wafer size and compatible with the mainstream microfabrication processes.

During his fellowship with Kavli ENSI, Hossein will work with Prof. James Analytis and Prof. Michael Crommie at UC Berkeley to apply his technique for boosting the coherence time of superconducting quantum bits (Qubits), a measure of how long a stored bit of information can live in a quantum memory. The impact of his proposed research can be better understood as we notice that companies such as Google, IBM, IMEC, BBN Technologies, Rigetti, and Intel are heavily investing on superconducting Qubits for the realization of quantum computers.