Edoardo Giusto

From 03/08/2023 to 19/12/2023

Challenges

CRIT-Q – COSMIC RAY IMPACT ON TRANSMON QUBITS

Fermilab - SQMS Center

Edo Giusto, Ph.D. (Member IEEE) obtained B.S. degree in 2015, M.S. degree in 2017, and Ph.D. degree in 2021 from Politecnico di Torino, Italy.
He is a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant at the Department of Control and Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Torino, and currently visiting the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. His research interests are focused on Quantum Computing, regarding both applications of QC as well as the reliability and fault tolerance of QC devices.

Quantum computing (QC) is one of the most promising technology advances of the latest years. Qubits are highly sensitive to noise, which can make the output useless. Lately, it has been shown that superconducting qubits are extremely susceptible to external sources of faults, such as ionizing radiation. When adopted in large scale, radiation-induced errors are expected to become a serious challenge for qubits reliability.

The project entails the study of these kinds of physical faults, understanding what kinds of changes are caused by them in the state of the qubit (i.e. the impact that they have) and the rate with which they happen. These pieces of information need to be brought to the computer engineering domain, to help the development of hardening techniques.

After an extensive literature study and precious discussions with domain experts, the collapse of the qubit from the excited to the ground state results the most prominent effect of these phenomena.
The project continues with the characterization of a software module to simulate these effect on the output probability of quantum circuit execution.

The project operates it the computer engineering field, specifically in the reliability domain. It proposes to advance the understanding of cosmic-ray induced errors on the most widespread QC technology, superconducting qubits. The developed techniques could be either employed and improved openly by the research community, or absorbed in more complex framework implemented by startups/companies. In this way, the project is reinforcing research collaboration between US and the EU by pushing for the advancements of standards in the reliability domain. Work resulted from the project will surely be submitted for publication in the form of a paper to a conference or an academic journal.