Research

Superconducting qubits

Towards scalable superconducting quantum processors

At the end of a quantum computation, we still have to tell one qubit state from another. On CQT’s 20-qubit superconducting processor, I tested whether machine-learning methods could make that readout more reliable.

The work also took me through error sources, gate fidelity, crosstalk, multi-qubit operations and the FPGA control stack.

How you calibrate a qubit →

Trapped-ion optics

Individual ion addressing

For my final-year project, I built and aligned a 355 nm laser setup with two acousto-optic deflectors. Changing the drive frequency steered the beam across a linear ion chain; the goal was to address one ion while keeping crosstalk low.

I measured diffraction orders from 130 to 210 MHz, modelled the steering in Python and checked the measurements against theory. The work also meant keeping the fibre, water chiller and amplifier behaving, and soldering parts when they did not.

How I built it, and what limited it → Read the thesis ↗

Cryptography

Proof systems

At KOI Foundation, I worked through Binius and sumcheck in Python, then built Rust proof systems with Lasso and Jolt-style lookups. The job was to turn terse protocol descriptions into data structures and verification checks I could run.

Sumcheck, lookups and Binius, as I learned them →

Quantum cryptography

What quantum mechanics can and can’t do for cryptography

A summer research internship in Marco Tomamichel’s quantum information group. I learned the field from Nielsen and Chuang and the review literature, then mapped what quantum mechanics offers two parties who don’t trust each other: key distribution is possible, perfect bit commitment and oblivious transfer are not, fair coin flipping survives only in a weaker form, and homomorphic encryption only with trade-offs.

For my own project I implemented a classical bit commitment scheme, used it to build a coin-flipping protocol, and worked through how commitment follows from oblivious transfer.

How I got there, and what I learned →

Published work

Heatwaves and water resources

My peer-reviewed paper grew out of a research internship. I analysed twenty years of US climate data in MATLAB, identifying more than 200 heatwave events and studying their effects on runoff, evapotranspiration and groundwater storage.

“Evaluating the effects of heatwave events on hydrological processes in the contiguous United States (2003–2022).” Journal of Hydrology 637, 131368 (2024). Read the paper ↗