ME Graduate Receives Fellowship to Develop Quantum Information Technologies

Atakan B. Arı, a graduate of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and currently a PhD candidate at Boston University in the US, has been named the recipient of a US Department of Energy (DOE) Science Graduate Student Research Program (SCGSR) award. The SCGSR program provides supplemental awards to outstanding graduate students in STEM fields to conduct part of their thesis research at a host DOE laboratory in collaboration with a DOE scientist.

For 12 months starting in January, Mr. Atakan will conduct research on the topic “Ultra-Low Dissipation Mechanical Resonators for Quantum Information Science” at Argonne National Laboratory’s Center for Nanoscale Materials. There, he will work to design and fabricate piezo-electromechanical resonators with high-quality factors that operate at tens of GHz. A key feature of these resonators is their ability to be cooled down to their quantum mechanical ground state without requiring any active feedback cooling systems, giving them a mechanical degree of freedom sufficient for cavity optomechanics, superconducting quantum circuits and quantum information science.

Mr. Atakan was among the ME department’s first undergraduate students; he completed his MS in the same department with the Hanay research group, where he developed novel nanomechanical sensors, before going on to Boston University for his PhD studies.