SuperMeQ partners met in Vienna

The 3rd SuperMeQ consortium meeting took place on 27-29 November 2024 in Vienna.

The SuperMeQ partners met at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information for three days filled with insightful discussions, idea exchanges, and plenty of opportunities to reconnect and collaborate. The updates from the project’s partners were complemented by inspiring presentations from guest speakers Salambô Dago (University of Vienna), Daniel Platz (TU Wien), Nicolas Díaz Naufal (Freie Universität Berlin) and Markus Arndt (University of Vienna).

The partners will meet again in February at the International Conference on Micromechanics while the next project’s meeting will take place in Munich on 6-8 October 2025.

Micromechanics Conference, February 2025, Obergurgl

The SuperMeQ project is pleased to announce the International Conference on Micromechanics 2025, taking place in Obergurgl (Austria) on February 2-7, 2025.

The conference is organized by Gerhard Kirchmair (IQOQI Innsbruck), Witlef Wieczorek (Chalmers University), Michael Trupke and Markus Aspelmeyer (University of Vienna), Hans Huebl (Walther Meißner Institute Munich), Anja Metelmann (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) and Carles Navau (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).

The conference focuses on the recent progress in the field of quantum-micromechanics with a special focus on levitated systems and circuit QED implementations. Levitated systems allow for extremely high mechanical Q factors while circuit QED systems provide large coupling strength between the mechanics and the resonator. Combining both of these approaches open the door towards controlling the quantum state of the mechanical system.

More information, the conference program and registration are available here: https://www.uibk.ac.at/en/congress/micromechanics/

Gerhard explains the world of quanta

You may have heard of transistors, capacitors and coils as components of a classic computer. But how do you turn it into a quantum computer? What does all this have to do with superconductors? What can quantum computers actually do better than a classic computer and why are Google, IBM and Intel interested in it?

At the Pint of Science Festival in Innsbruck on 22-24 May 2023, Gerhard Kirchmair (OAEW.V) explains how to elicit quantum phenomena from electrical circuits with the help of superconductors and how to use them to build a quantum computer that can do “some things” better than a classical computer. The research conducted in SuperMeQ is used as a practical reference.

Cool with a nonlinear cavity

oeaw-canti

The OEAW Innsbruck team together with the team from KIT have demonstrated a new way of cooling mechanical motion. This novel method exploits the nonlinearity of a superconducting flux-tunable microcavity, which is coupled to the motion of a mechanical cantilever. By driving the cavity in the nonlinear regime, enhanced cooling of the center-of-mass motion was demonstrated. All the details can be read here, with a synopsis here and a news article here. Congrats to the OEAW Innsbruck and KIT teams for this excellent work!