2024 Bronze Medal Award

The group is recognized for monolithically integrating superconducting single-photon detectors with ion traps while maintaining state-of-the-art performance for quantum-state detection. Such integration had been previously thwarted by seemingly insurmountable technical challenges. The group used clever engineering to shield the detector from trapping fields and noise that is inherent in ion traps. This demonstration is a key step toward scaling ion-trap quantum computers to the large numbers of physical quantum bits needed to solve the hardest problems in quantum information science.