Noah Kurinsky

Full Committee Markup of Commerce, Justice, Science; Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA; and Legislative Branch Appropriations Acts | United States Senate Committee on Appropriations United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

Senate committee on appropriations markup meeting is starting now. They'll be discussing a lot of stuff, but in particular, science agencies like NSF & NASA.

Yesterday Sen. Moran indicated funding would be 33.9 billion, preserving FY '24 numbers.
www.appropriations.senate.gov/hearings/ful...

Both programs no longer have a webpage

I’m a Co-I on one of each and there is no “guidance” just a vague stop work order at the labs. The campus grants are proceeding as normal for now but it’s unclear if the money will actually materialize

Two programs aimed at supporting students from non-R1 institutions are currently on hold: DOE FAIR and RENEW. Adding this to the list of canceled NSF summer programs and it’s going to be a tough year for undergraduate research. 🧪

Controversial take: many private foundations already limit overhead to 15%, and universities accept those terms. That opens them up to the question of why the government should pay such higher rates. While the way they’re going about this is objectively wrong, the underlying issue is legitimate.

This is the most fraught transition I have personally experienced. I am stressed but focused on trying to keep in mind that being stressed/discouraged is part of their goal. We need to keep in working as if there’s not a toddler in the White House throwing a tantrum.

Some places have pre-emptively stopped research activities (looking at you UChicago). Reach out to your administration and ask them to demand clearer guidance from program managers and agency management before they have knee-jerk reactions

Re: executive orders in recent days. We have gotten agency-wide memos with similar language to the funding freeze memo, but so far due to lack of specific guidance it is business as usual at most of the national labs.

Non science post - if the wicked musical has any place in your heart the movie will be an absolute joy

Some more nice photos removing our vacuum shields of the cryostat (cryo shields had already been taken off). Jacqueline Orrell/SLAC National Laboratory

Had a photo shoot in the lab for some tour graphics and got this gem - my lab is developing a laser scanner for position dependent irradiation tests of superconducting devices (Photo credit Jacqueline Orrell/SLAC National Laboratory) 🧪❄️

The Superconducting Quasiparticle-Amplifying Transmon: A Qubit-Based Sensor for meV Scale Phonons and Single THz Photons With great interest from the quantum computing community, an immense amount of R&D effort has been invested into improving superconducting qubits. The technologies developed for the design and fabrica...

Architecture described here: arxiv.org/abs/2310.01345. First results presented at CPAD2024 tomorrow! #cpad2024

More thoughts on this tomorrow. Our group is presenting new results where we can replicate the same quasiparticle poisoning in simpler qubit-derived superconducting devices - we are using these as sensors and in the process aiming to learn more about mitigating or enhancing these couplings.

Quasiparticle Poisoning of Superconducting Qubits from Resonant Absorption of Pair-breaking Photons The ideal superconductor provides a pristine environment for the delicate states of a quantum computer: because there is an energy gap to excitations, there are no spurious modes with which the qubits...

A paper that succinctly explores the interactions of qubits with pair-breaking radiation can be found here: arxiv.org/abs/2203.06577. Note the main point that the baseline poisoning is correlated most strongly with the resonant mode volume of the qubit.

One of the key issues in quantum computing is illustrated here - how does one isolate a system enough that it can thermalize entirely while still interacting with it? While we can do fairly well, we need better solutions to limit pair breaking radiation in our readout lines.

In particular, the ability to elucidate multiple energy scales relevant to thermal and poisoned tunneling helps show how strongly athermal this effect is. It’s interesting that the rate in the excited state does not plateau in the same way as the ground state.

Starting a series of posts where I share thoughts about work to better understand thermalization in superconductors through quasiparticle poisoning measurements. My group has been enjoying this paper from the Devoret group: arxiv.org/html/2302.12... 🧪

Hi - physicist working at SLAC National Laboratory, I run a lab at the interface of astrophysics and quantum information. My inspire profile: inspirehep.net/authors/1622...