Adan Azem is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia and a well-rounded rising star in the Canadian quantum computing scene. For the past seven months she has been working with the low-temperature team at Xanadu, a Canadian quantum computing company. Azem’s expertise bridges physics and electrical engineering, and her curiosity has taken her from nanofabrication to the design and characterization of superconducting devices for single-photon detection.
Azem’s QuEST-funded research at UBC has primarily focused on the design, development, and characterization of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors for the near-infrared (IR) and mid-IR range. Co-supervised by Lukas Chrostowski and Jeff Young, Azem is developing a waveguide integrated detector that could potentially be integrated into a range of quantum information processing applications. She will eventually deploy her single-photon detectors to support an architecture proposed by Robert Raussendorf, postdoctoral fellow Andreas Pfenning, and fellow PhD student Xiruo Yan.
“Our detectors are usually operated in the near-IR regime but for this project, we have been working on pushing their spectral range to the mid-IR regime,” said Azem. “Currently, many of us are working on the architecture which we hope will lead to realizing spin qubits in a silicon photonics platform.”
Azem was always fascinated by exploiting material properties to develop new useful devices, and so she enrolled in the Quantum BC-led NSERC CREATE program in Quantum Computing to learn more about quantum computing hardware. The CREATE program requires participants to complete an eight-month industry-based internship.
