Google Quantum AI Lab’s John Martinis

(GigaBitMagazine) Last week, a document posted to (and then immediately withdrawn from) NASA’s website revealed that a team of Google researchers at the tech giant’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab had reached a significant milestone: demonstrating “Quantum Supremacy.”
In this article, Gigabit takes a look at the engineer who reportedly led the team that demonstrated quantum supremacy: John M. Martinis.
An alumnus of the University of California, Berkeley, Martinis has been involved in the developing frontier of quantum computing, working for the NIST, where 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 effort has focused on building a quantum computer using Josephson junctions – the subject of his PhD.
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. Dr. Martinis was a NIST Fellow, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. At the University of California, Santa Barbara he currently holds the Wooster Chair in experimental physics. In 2014 he was awarded the London Prize for his pioneering work on superconducting qubits. In 2014, Dr. Martinis joined Google to head up their quantum-hardware effort. The aim of this research is to build the first useful quantum computer,” explains his Google bio.