Plenary Lecture

Evelyn Hu

Tarr-Coyne Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering
John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard University

“Where Imperfections Lead to Opportunities: “Defects” as Solid-State Qubits”
Monday, November 7, 2022 – 5:30 PM EDT

Abstract

We often make the natural assumption that a “perfectly structured” material is required to produce “perfect functioning” of a device, where the function may relate to precision sensing, or the storing or transmission of information. Recently, however, there has been excitement about the performance of defects in crystalline semiconductors such as diamond and SiC. The defects, such as vacancies or “missing atoms” are deviations from perfect, periodic crystalline order. Yet such defects can manifest optical emission at a variety of wavelengths, distinctively coupled to long spin coherence times. With a general introduction to such “perfectly imperfect” materials, this talk will highlight our studies in 4H-SiC of defects (qubits), integrated within photonic amplifiers. This integrated system not only enhances the qubit signal, but also can serve as a “nanoscope” into the material, allowing us to learn about the details of their atomic environment. The correlated photonic and spin behavior of such defects will be discussed.

Biography

Evelyn Hu is the Tarr-Coyne Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. Her research involves the study of nanoscale photonic devices demonstrating exceptional efficiencies and holding promise for new quantum information technologies.

She received a Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University, worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and was a faculty member at UCSB, in the Departments of Materials, and of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2008), the National Academy of Engineering (2002), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2010), and the Academica Sinica of Taiwan (2004). She was named a Harvard College Professor (2015-2020), has been named the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentorship and Advising (2018), is a recipient of an NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar award (2005), and an AAAS Lifetime Mentor Award (2000). She was awarded the 2020 Andrew Grove Award given by the IEEE, and the 2021 IEEE/RSE James Clerk Maxwell Medal. She holds honorary Doctorates from the University of Glasgow (1995), Heriot-Watt University (2013), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2013), the University of Notre Dame (2014), and ETH Zurich (2019).