Dr. Pratibha Dev awarded NSF ExpandQISE

Associate Professor of Physics, Dr. Pratibha Dev, was recently awarded the National Science Foundation’s ExpandQISE grant ($799,811 over the next three years). The overarching research goal of the grant is to fingerprint and engineer tunable carbon-based quantum emitters within one of the layered 2D materials, hexagonal boron nitride. Prof. Dev will serve as the PI on this grant and will work closely with her collaborator and co-PI, Prof. Benjamín Alemán from the University of Oregon.

The research team will focus on deep level defects, which were recently discovered in hexagonal boron nitride. These defects are solid state quantum bit (qubit)-candidates for novel quantum technologies. To date, the identities of the deep level defects in hexagonal boron nitride layers have largely remained a mystery, frustrating both the ability to make them and to control their properties. This joint theory-experiment project aims to identify and tailor promising carbon-based deep-level defects in hexagonal boron nitride layers via a combination of theoretical and experimental defect-fingerprinting techniques. This work will also impact the needs of this field more broadly, by establishing the use of fingerprinting-techniques to identify deep-level defects in other 2D layered materials. The project will directly engage graduate and undergraduate students from the two universities, providing education and research opportunities in quantum information science and engineering (QISE).