Biography:Andrew Houck

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Short description: American quantum scientist


Andrew A. Houck (born June 20, 1979) is an American physicist, quantum information scientist, and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University. He is director of the Co-Design Center for Quantum Advantage, a national research center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, as well as co-director of the Princeton Quantum Initiative.[1] His research focuses on superconducting electronic circuits to process and store information for quantum computing[2] and to simulate and study many-body physics.[3][4] He is a pioneer of superconducting qubits.

Early life and education

Andrew Houck grew up in Colts Neck, New Jersey, the son of David and Dennie Houck.[5] He studied electrical engineering at Princeton, where he was valedictorian of the Class of 2000. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2005.

Research

As a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, in Robert Shoelkopf's lab, Houck was part of the team that originally developed the transmon[6][7] — a superconducting qubit that is insensitive to charge noise — now the basic unit of hardware for many of today's most mature quantum technologies.[8][9] He later redesigned the transmon using tantalum, leading to a major improvement in this class of devices.[10]

In 2019, Houck led a group that developed a microchip to simulate particle interactions in a hyperbolic plane, useful in investigating quantum phenomena.[11]

He has called quantum computing an "enabling technology" to solve problems in national security, health and climate change.[12]

References

  1. "Princeton Engineering - Princeton introduces a Ph.D. program at intersection of quantum physics and information theory" (in en-US). https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2023/11/13/princeton-introduces-ph-d-program-intersection-quantum-physics-and-information-theory. 
  2. "Andrew Houck" (in en). https://www.technologyreview.com/innovator/andrew-houck/. 
  3. Houck, Andrew A.; Türeci, Hakan E.; Koch, Jens (April 2012). "On-chip quantum simulation with superconducting circuits" (in en). Nature Physics 8 (4): 292–299. doi:10.1038/nphys2251. ISSN 1745-2481. https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys2251. 
  4. Kollár, Alicia J.; Fitzpatrick, Mattias; Houck, Andrew A. (July 2019). "Hyperbolic lattices in circuit quantum electrodynamics" (in en). Nature 571 (7763): 45–50. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1348-3. ISSN 1476-4687. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1348-3. 
  5. "Princeton - News - Princeton Names 2000 Valedictorian, Salutatorian". https://pr.princeton.edu/news/00/q2/0508-valsal.htm. 
  6. Koch, Jens; Yu, Terri M.; Gambetta, Jay; Houck, A. A.; Schuster, D. I.; Majer, J.; Blais, Alexandre; Devoret, M. H. et al. (2007-10-12). "Charge-insensitive qubit design derived from the Cooper pair box". Physical Review A 76 (4): 042319. doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.76.042319. https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.76.042319. 
  7. Schreier, J. A.; Houck, A. A.; Koch, Jens; Schuster, D. I.; Johnson, B. R.; Chow, J. M.; Gambetta, J. M.; Majer, J. et al. (2008-05-12). "Suppressing charge noise decoherence in superconducting charge qubits". Physical Review B 77 (18): 180502. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.77.180502. https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.77.180502. 
  8. Qiskit (2022-09-28). "How The First Superconducting Qubit Changed Quantum Computing Forever" (in en). https://medium.com/qiskit/how-the-first-superconducting-qubit-changed-quantum-computing-forever-96cf261b8498. 
  9. Metz, Cade (2017-11-13). "Yale Professors Race Google and IBM to the First Quantum Computer" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/technology/quantum-computing-research.html. 
  10. Place, Alexander P. M.; Rodgers, Lila V. H.; Mundada, Pranav; Smitham, Basil M.; Fitzpatrick, Mattias; Leng, Zhaoqi; Premkumar, Anjali; Bryon, Jacob et al. (2021-03-19). "New material platform for superconducting transmon qubits with coherence times exceeding 0.3 milliseconds" (in en). Nature Communications 12 (1): 1779. doi:10.1038/s41467-021-22030-5. ISSN 2041-1723. PMC 7979772. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22030-5. 
  11. Sharlach, Molly (July 15, 2019). "Strange warping geometry helps to push scientific boundaries" (in en). https://www.princeton.edu/news/2019/07/15/strange-warping-geometry-helps-push-scientific-boundaries. 
  12. "Q&A: Andrew Houck ’00 on Princeton’s New Quantum Science Institute" (in en). 2023-09-17. https://paw.princeton.edu/article/qa-andrew-houck-00-princetons-new-quantum-science-institute.