2025 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit

Symposium MQ01-Materials for Quantum Information Science

Development of qubits in recent years has been underlined by advances through circuit design, device fabrication, and standardized metrology to systematically compare qubit performance created by different platforms. However, further improvement and especially, scalable manufacturing of qubits require a bottom-up approach in which one can control the assembly and interaction of atoms across different interfaces. This quest calls for advances in materials synthesis, characterization, and processing, in addition to materials selection. Our symposium will bring together efforts related to the broad topic of “Materials for Quantum Information Science” encompassing three major platforms: (i) superconducting qubits, (ii) color centers and (iii) hybrid quantum systems including semiconductor quantum dots, topological protected systems and molecular qubits.
The first part of the symposium will focus on materials synthesis and processing, with a special focus on large scale synthesis for qubit manufacturing. Topics include advances in deposition and epitaxial growth of superconductor thin films and dielectrics, controlled creation of color centers (vacancies, dislocations, and dopants) during material growth, synthesis of core-shell nanowires with coherent interface, and solution and evaporation-based crystallization of molecular crystals. Synthesis and integration of emerging materials, such as van der Waals materials, are also welcome. In the second part of the symposium, we will discuss different techniques to characterize quantum materials and quantum systems, including structural and chemical characterization techniques as well as physical measurement techniques at both the material and device level. Symposium contributions should address basic questions regarding how the structural order and disorder within materials impacts the performance of the associated quantum devices. The materials characterization techniques include, but are not limited to, scanning transmission electron microscopy, scanning probe microscopy, x-ray scattering and tomography, and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The physical measurements will cover a wide range of techniques, including cryogenic magneto transport and optics, power-dependent resonator measurement, SQUID on-tip, scanning microwave spectroscopy and scanning nearfield optics. The symposium will bring together diverse experts in materials science, physics, chemistry, and engineering from across academia, national labs, and industry to discuss the current developments and identify challenges as well as opportunities in materials for QIS.

Topics will include:

Materials selection and synthesis for QIS: superconducting thin films, dielectrics, wide band gap semiconductors, molecular crystals, quantum dots and nanowires, emergent materials including 2D materials
Sources of decoherence in qubits: two-level-system (TLS) loss and non-TLS loss
Structural and chemical characterization of quantum materials and quantum systems: non-destructive and destructive techniques
Physical measurements of quantum materials and quantum devices: metrics and techniques to measure coherence time, quality factors and noises
High throughput characterization of materials and devices
Correlation between structure and coherence: challenges and opportunities
Scaling of qubits to large systems: challenges and opportunities
Open question: “What are major materials challenges plaguing the various qubit platforms?”

Invited Speakers:

Igor Aharonovich (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
Monica Allen (University of California, San Diego, USA)
Erik Bakkers (Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands)
Sophia Economou (Virginia Tech, USA)
Danna Freedman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Ran Gao (Quantum Science Center, China)
Sinéad Griffin (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA)
Joe Heremans (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
Mark Hersam (Northwestern University, USA)
Moïra Hocevar (Institut Néel Grenoble, France)
Bethany Huffman (Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Seva Ivanov (Virginia Tech, USA)
Sasha Ivlev (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
Julian Klein (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Helena Knowles (Cambridge University, United Kingdom)
Angela Kou (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
Marko Loncar (Harvard University, USA)
Xuedan Ma (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
Tony McFadden (National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA)
David Pappas (Rigetti Computing, USA)
Alex Romanenko (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, USA)
Naoya Shibata (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
Tokuyuki Teraji (National Institute for Materials Science, Japan)