Ruichao Ma
Purdue University, IN·Physics·Early-career
In some materials, electrons push and pull on each other so strongly that the behavior of the whole cannot be predicted from the behavior of one particle. These strongly correlated materials show unusual properties that are attractive for technology, but studying them is hard: real materials constantly lose energy to their surroundings, and that leakage obscures the interactions physicists want to measure.
- Fields
Physics
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
superconducting circuits
synthetic quantum materials
microwave photons
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Develop a dynamically tunable broadband bath, an engineered reservoir the circuit can exchange energy with on demand, and use it to stabilize and manipulate collective photon phases in superconducting circuits.
- Realize strongly interacting many-body phases of microwave photons in Bose-Hubbard lattices, arrays where photons hop between neighboring sites and repel one another, and in topological lattices whose behavior is set by their global structure.
- Investigate non-equilibrium quantum phases that persist only under continuous driving, using the precise control over interactions and dissipation available in superconducting quantum circuits.
- Track how particles move and how entanglement, the shared quantum correlations between parts of a system, evolves in many-body localized circuits coupled to thermal or quantum baths and to local energy loss.
- Use these measurements to obtain a microscopic picture of thermalization toward quantum many-body phases and of the interplay between interaction, topology and dissipation.
- Deliver quantum research training for undergraduate and graduate students along with new accessible quantum information science education materials and outreach for K-12 students and teachers.
More about the research
This project takes the opposite approach to studying such matter. Instead of examining a natural crystal, it builds a designer stand-in out of microwave photons, particles of light at the frequencies used in radar and mobile phones, trapped in superconducting electrical circuits. In these circuits the interactions, the geometry of the lattice and even the surrounding environment can be set by the experimenter, so energy loss becomes a knob to turn rather than a nuisance.
Why it matters
Strongly correlated quantum materials carry properties that are promising for future technologies but are difficult to probe in natural samples. Building tunable analogues from microwave photons in superconducting circuits could guide the discovery and design of such materials and clarify how dissipation affects them. The methods for creating and stabilizing fragile many-body states may transfer to other quantum platforms and help identify quantum information resources robust to environmental noise, while the award's training and outreach activities build quantum literacy among students and teachers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yizhi You
Northeastern University, MA·Physics·Early-career
Construct microscopic models and hybrid fracton field theories to describe the collective behavior of fractons, particle-like excitations with restricted mobility, and the phases and phase transitions they form.
Nir Navon
Yale University, CT·Physics
Test whether short-time spectral properties, measured with radio-frequency probes of synthetic spins, already encode the final outcome of thermalization in a strongly interacting ultracold Fermi gas.
Angela Kou
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Physics·Early-career
Locate the origin of local, unpredictable defects in superconducting transmon qubits using a scanning microwave resonator probe that measures time-resolved qubit behavior.
The school
Purdue University: 43 labs on PI Pages, $932M a year on research, 833 research doctorates a year.
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