Our Speaker: Dr. John M. Martinis attended UC Berkeley from 1976 to 1987, where he received two degrees in Physics: B.S. (1980) and Ph.D. (1987).  His thesis research focused on macroscopic quantum tunneling in Josephson Junctions.  After completing a post-doctoral position at the Commisiariat Energie Atomic in Saclay, France, he joined the Electromagnetic Technology division at NIST in Boulder.  At NIST he was involved in understanding the basic physics of the Coulomb Blockade, and worked to use this phenomenon to make a new fundamental electrical standard based on counting electrons.  Since 2002 his research efforts have focused on building a quantum computer using Josephson junctions.  He has pioneered many important demonstrations, including entangled states, Bell state violation, Fock and arbitrary photon generation, and photon NOON states.  In 2010, he was awarded with collaborator Andrew Cleland the "Science Breakthrough of the Year" for the first demonstration of the quantum ground state in a mechanical oscillator system.  In 2014 he was awarded the London Prize for low-temperature physics research on superconducting quantum bits.  In 2014 he also began working for Google, heading an effort to build a practical quantum computer.

This meeting is sponsored in part by Santa Barbara News-Press

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