Sam has been named as one of the recipients of the 2025 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Fellowship!

Research Title: Optimized Pulse Shaping for Readout of Superconducting Quantum Computers

Research description: Superconducting quantum bits (qubits) are a leading architecture for realizing the paradigm-shifting potential of quantum computers. While current quantum processors have demonstrated advantage over classical computers for simple problems, the size and performance of these systems need to be massively increased to enable advantage for key problems in computing. A critical challenge for these devices is achieving fast, high-fidelity control and readout. For control, significant improvements have been achieved by using optimization techniques to design sophisticated pulse shapes for efficiently implementing quantum logic gates. While readout could benefit from a similar approach, existing methods for modeling readout cannot easily account for how measurement drives influence the qubit state, leading relatively simple analytical pulse shapes to be the dominant approach. Recently, our group developed a Maxwell-Schrödinger numerical method for modeling the interactions between transmission lines and qubits, which we have employed to model readout and estimate readout fidelity. In this work, we will combine this method with an optimization framework leveraging techniques from quantum optimal control to design high-fidelity readout pulses. Further, we will collaborate with our experimental partners to test these optimized pulses and show how they can improve readout fidelity and the overall performance of quantum hardware.