$10,000 in seed funding will back Han Zhao’s one-year UCF project to stabilize superconducting quantum circuits with topological mechanical braiding instead of conventional error-correction-heavy designs.
The approach uses nanomechanical resonators coupled to superconducting microwave circuits, aiming to make individual quantum gates inherently resistant to environmental noise such as thermal fluctuations, stray radiofrequency fields and vibrations.
ORAU provided a $5,000 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, matched by $5,000 from UCF, with the full amount directed to graduate student support and hardware control equipment.
The work targets a major quantum-computing bottleneck: standard quantum error correction can protect logic operations, but typically requires large numbers of physical qubits to build one reliable logical qubit.