A team of physicists has uncovered a new state of matter—a breakthrough that offers promise for increasing storage capabilities in electronic devices and enhancing quantum computing.
Prof. Shabani who has received his BSc. from Sharif University of Technology in 2004, continued his studies in Princeton University and received his PhD in 2011. After two years of research on semiconductor-based qubits at Harvard University, he joined UC Santa Barbara. There, he worked closely with Microsoft research on hybrid semiconductors/superconductors heterostructures to study topological superconductivity.
In this research, Shabani and his colleagues analyzed a transition of quantum state from its conventional state to a new topological state, measuring the energy barrier between these states. They supplemented this by directly measuring signature characteristics of this transition in the order parameter that governs the new topological superconductivity phase.
“The new discovery of topological superconductivity in a two-dimensional platform paves the way for building scalable topological qubits to not only store quantum information, but also to manipulate the quantum states that are free of error,” observes Shabani.