ECE’s Robert Niffenegger Obtains Prestigious NSF CAREER Award to Revolutionize Research with “Trapped Ions”

Content

Robert Niffenegger – an assistant professor in the UMass Amherst Electrical and Computer Engineering Department – has received a coveted National Science Foundation CAREER Award of $624,196 for five years to do revolutionary research developing integrated technologies for trapped ion qubits. As the principal investigator on the NSF project, Niffenegger says that the new integrated platform for trapped ion qubits will yield transformative impacts on quantum computing, sensing, timekeeping, and measurements of fundamental physics.

“Trapped ions are used in the most powerful quantum computers in the world and for the most precise optical clocks in the world,” says Niffenegger. “They have been a foundational platform for quantum science going back almost fifty years. Yet, their underlying hardware hasn’t changed much in that time. This project aims to change that.”

Trapped ions are charged atomic particles, which, due to this charge, can be trapped and controlled by electric fields. Then laser beams can be used to precisely control their atomic states, turning them into qubits or clocks/sensors. Niffenegger’s UMass Trapped Ions and Photonics lab is working to develop new integrated technologies to help make scalable quantum computing with trapped ions a reality. 

According to Niffenegger, “Developing trapped-ion quantum processors with integrated photonics and other integrated technologies like electronics and detectors may enable the next generation of quantum hardware towards large-scale quantum computers and practical applications.” Integrated photonics is a rapidly advancing field that combines optics and nanofabrication to create integrated circuits for optical light.

One key aspect of Niffenegger’s NSF research concerns the “qubit,” which (according to the IBM website) is “the basic unit of information used to encode data in quantum computing and can be best understood as the quantum equivalent of the traditional bit used by classical computers to encode information in binary.”

As Niffenegger explains, current quantum technologies have been saturated at a handful of qubits with hardware that isn’t scalable to thousands or millions of qubits. As he says, “To realize operational quantum advantage for computing, and to improve precision for sensing, timekeeping, and fundamental physics measurements, the number of trapped ions in these systems must be scaled up. Yet, this would require laboratories full of sensitive, complex equipment, limiting the portability, scalability, and accessibility of these systems.” 

In his NSF proposal, Niffenegger offers an alternative and transformational approach that combines trapped-ion quantum research with integrated-photonics research to solve these problems. “The ultimate goal is to create a full quantum system-on-a-chip that could be used for both quantum computing applications and quantum sensing applications,” says Niffenegger. “We’ve recently shown success testing critical integrated components separately on different chips, and we are working now to place everything on a single chip. This is a goal that the field has been working towards for a long time and will require multiple collaborations to be successful.”

Niffenegger is well-grounded in the research he is doing with NSF support. Prior to arriving at UMass Amherst, Niffenegger completed his post-doc at MIT Lincoln Laboratory working on trapped ions and integrated photonics and demonstrated full photonic control of a trapped-ion qubit. Before that, he worked at Intel as an Integration and Yield Engineer and patented a new metal-gate process. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Purdue University. (April 2024)