Jalen Garner | Quantum Researcher

Jalen Garner | Quantum Researcher

Senior at Howard University

Jalen Garner is figuring out how quantum computers can operate with lower error rates.

Garner, a physics major at Howard University, is a IBM-HBCU Undergraduate Research Scholar, a lab member at Howard’s Quantum Materials Modeling Laboratory, and a member of the development team at the quantum computing start-up Error Corp.

Error Corp. works to create logic gates that are more robust against errors. Garner works to test and implement Error Corp.’s work on IBM Quantum systems.

The following interview has been edited and condensed.

IBM Quantum: How did you become involved in quantum computing?

Jalen Garner: It was my first semester of physics and I had just joined an intro class. I was an active student, really showing that I was interested in the topic. The professor, Sugata Chowdhury, pulled me aside after class one day and asked, “Do you want to join my research group? I’m doing research into quantum materials.” I was a freshman, so immediately I said yes. I knew quantum was the frontier of physics and I wanted to get into research right away.

The next year, IBM Quantum’s Kayla Lee reached out to me via my undergraduate advisor. They were setting up the IBM-HBCU Undergraduate Research Program, offering students at HBCUs scholarships and research opportunities, plus the ability to use advanced IBM Quantum hardware free-of-charge.

That’s how I got into Error Corp. They needed people around Maryland, they went through IBM-HBCU, IBM-HBCU reached out to Howard, and here I am.

Tell us about your work at Error Corp.

We do noise suppression. In a quantum computer, you have different sources of noise. There’s decoherence noise: Some external source of noise that keeps flipping the qubit from the 1 to the 0 state or vice-versa. And then there’s dephasing, where the orientation of the qubit changes.

We are building noise-suppressing gates, which are ways of preparing those pulses to minimize decoherence and dephasing errors. It’s basically a geometry problem.

Error Corp. creates the software to synthesize these noise-suppressing control pulses. My job is to take them and translate them into a pulse that you can do in Qiskit. That involved breaking down and understanding IBM systems.

You’re also doing undergraduate research.

I work in a lab that studies quantum materials and my research is in topological insulators. These are materials that insulate against electricity passing through their interiors, but their surfaces conduct electricity very efficiently. And those surface properties are protected from any deformations in the material itself, unlike regular insulators. My project has been to really study the properties of the topological insulator manganese-bismuth-telluride. There are potential applications here for low-energy electronics and nanodevices, including quantum computing.

What’s next for you?

I’ll be starting my PhD at the University of Maryland in the Fall at their Laboratory for Physical Sciences Qubit Collaboratory, doing some work on silicon vacancies and spin qubits — another potential quantum computing platform. Down the road, I want to stay in quantum research, maybe at a national laboratory or IBM itself.