The Quantum Frontier: Tackling Errors and Exploring Rydberg States with Dr. Steven Girvin

In Episode 85, Patrick and Ciprian speak with returning guest Steven Girvin of Yale University. The team discusses error correction, Rydberg states, erasure errors, and dual rail encoding.

Dr. Steve Girvin
After graduating in a high school class of 5 students in the small village of Brant Lake, NY and completing his undergraduate degree in physics from Bates College, Dr. Girvin earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton University in 1977. 

Dr. Girvin joined the Yale faculty in 2001, where he is Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Professor of Applied Physics.  From 2007 to 2017 he served as Yale’s Deputy Provost for Research, overseeing strategic planning for research across Yale.  From 2019 to 2021, he served as founding director of the Co-Design Center for Quantum Advantage, one of five national quantum information science research centers funded by the Department of Energy.  

Along with his experimenter colleagues Michel Devoret and Robert Schoelkopf, Professor Girvin co-developed ‘circuit QED,’ the leading architecture for construction of quantum computers based on superconducting microwave circuits.  

Dr. Girvin is a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.  In 2007, he and his collaborators, Allan H. MacDonald and James P. Eisenstein were awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society for their work on the fractional quantum Hall effect.   In 2019, he and coauthor Kun Yang published the textbook “Modern Condensed Matter Physics” with Cambridge University Press.