Oscar Kennedy
HEAD OF DEVICE SCALING
Oscar has a background in quantum devices, RF instrumentation and materials science. Before joining OQC Oscar was a UCLQ fellow working on spin-based quantum memories. He now leads a team running projects spanning next generation sample packaging, superconducting device design and measurement.
Scott Manifold
QUANTUM ENGINEER
Scott completed his PhD at Cardiff University working in the Cardiff Diamond Foundry where he gained experience in quantum device development. This included nanofabrication and low temperature RF and DC characterisation of superconducting diamond Josephson junctions and co-planar resonators. At OQC, he specialises in the research and development of next generation cryogenic input-output technologies and their integration into dilution refrigerators.
Brian Vlastakis
VP OF QUANTUM SCIENCE & EXPLORATORY RESEARCH
Brian is VP of Quantum Science & Exploratory Research at OQC. Originally from the United States, Brian moved to the UK in 2017 where he has served as a Marie Curie research fellow at the University of Oxford focusing on superconducting quantum circuits. Previously a research staff scientist for IBM, Brian helped develop their large-scale quantum computing platform. He was also a part of the founding team for the ‘IBM Quantum Experience’, the first publicly-accessible quantum computer. Brian received his PhD in experimental physics at Yale University with work that showed the largest ‘Schrodinger cat states’ to date using microwave photons.
Mohammad Tasnimul Haque
QUANTUM ENGINEER
Mohammad Tasnimul Haque is a quantum engineer specialising in superconducting quantum circuits, cryogenic measurements, and quantum transport. He currently works in our Quantum Science and Exploratory Research group, where he focuses on qubit calibration, benchmarking, and optimising cryogenic measurement systems for high-fidelity quantum operations. Prior to this, he served as a Doctoral Researcher at Aalto University’s Low Temperature Laboratory in Finland, where he investigated superconducting quantum circuits with graphene Josephson junctions under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Pertti Hakonen.
Bryn Bell
HEAD OF APPLICATIONS AND BENCHMARKING
Bryn joined OQC in 2021 as a Senior Quantum Engineer working on characterising, calibrating, and benchmarking our QPUs, and more recently has changed role to Head of Applications and Benchmarking. He worked for 10 years as an academic researcher specialising in experimental quantum optics and quantum information science, authoring or co-authoring around 40 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Bryn received his PhD from the University of Bristol, working on optical quantum computing with fibre-optic sources of entangled photons, before going on to postdoctoral positions at the University of Sydney and Oxford University, working on single photon sources, frequency converters, and circuits based on silicon photonic chips. Immediately prior to joining OQC Bryn held a Marie Skłodowska Curie fellowship at Imperial College London.
EVENT DETAILS
This March, we will be attending the APS Global Physics Summit 2025 in Anaheim to speak on our latest technology advancements. The APS Global Physics Summit is the largest physics research conference in the world, uniting 14,000 scientific community members across all disciplines of physics.
OQC team members will be presenting throughout this year’s conference. Don’t miss our speaking sessions, see where to find us and when below:
Post-fabrication adjustment of Josephson junctions – materials and techniques
Authors: Oscar Kennedy, Jared Cole (RMIT University), Connor Shelly
Date and time: Monday 17th March, 17:48 -18:00
Presenter: Oscar Kennedy | Head of Device Scaling
Our Head of Device Scaling, Oscar Kennedy will be speaking on technologies used to alter Josephson junction properties post-manufacture. These techniques are becoming increasingly important in order to build high-quality large-scale quantum computers by enabling corrections to be made to as-manufactured junction properties. The research carried out considers what is changing in the junctions during the tuning processes.
Access the full preprint on arXiv or read the TL:DR.
Thermal modelling of cryogenic input-output platforms for scaling superconducting quantum computers beyond 1000 qubits
Authors: Scott Manifold, George Long, Jonathan Burnett
Date and Time: Tuesday 18th March, 14:06 – 14:18
Presenter: Scott Manifold | Quantum Engineer
Our Quantum Engineer, Scott Manifold, will be presenting work on thermal capacity mapping of cryogenic platforms for quantum computing. This novel approach addresses the critical challenge of scaling input-output payloads for quantum processors by creating comprehensive “platform capacity maps” that accurately quantify how dilution refrigerators respond to complex distributed heat loads. Unlike existing methods that use simplified approximations, this technique accounts for all thermal dependencies between cooling stages, providing a powerful design tool for predicting system performance. This innovation enables more reliable scaling of quantum hardware and has applications across various cryogenic technologies.
Multimode superconducting qubit with three-wave mixing interaction for dual-rail encoding
Authors: Boris Shteynas, James Wills, Gioele Consani, Brian Vlastakis
Date and Time: Wednesday 19th March,10:48 – 11:00
Presenter: Brian Vlastakis | VP of Quantum Science & Exploratory Research
Our VP of Quantum Science & Exploratory Research, Brian Vlastakis, will be presenting a novel multi-mode qubit for hardware efficient dual-rail encoding. The qubit includes a three-wave mixing element which provides the necessary interaction for side-band transitions between modes while still being at a quadratically insensitive bias point. The work carried out shows that this is due to the inherent protection of the logical encoding from flux noise. One of these transitions realises a single-qubit gate of the dual-rail qubit without leaving the logical single-excitation subspace and therefore provides additional protection from bit-flip errors. Wide tunability and the richness of interactions enables a variety of two-qubit gates for coupled dual-rail qubits.
3D-integrated filters for superconducting quantum circuits
Authors: Waqas Ahmad, Gioele Consani, Mohammad Tasnimul Haque, Brian Vlastakis
Date and Time: Thursday 20th March, 11:42- 11:54
Presenter: Tasnimul Haque | Quantum Engineer
Our Quantum Engineer, Mohammad Tasnimul Haque will be presenting on a 3D-integrated superconducting qubit package with Purcell filters. A design which enables readout multiplexing, does not increase the physical footprint of the device, and has compatibility for arrays of thousands of qubits. This packaging is demonstrated with a thirtyfive-qubit device and shows coherence times above one hundred microseconds. Analysis of filter protection and bandwidth will also be presented.
Exploring and benchmarking cross-resonance gates via the second excited state
Authors: Bryn Bell, Travers Ward, Ailsa Keyser, Richard Bounds, Norbert Deak, Brian Vlastakis, Jonathan Burnett
Date and Time: Friday 21st March, 10:00-10:12
Presenter: Bryn Bell | Head of Applications and Benchmarking
Our Head of Applications and Benchmarking, Bryn Bell, will be speaking on work carried out to investigate a variation of cross-resonance interaction on fixed-frequency transmon qubits. While the cross-resonance interaction has been used to demonstrate high-fidelity two qubit gates, scaling is challenging due to the gate-speed and fidelity being highly sensitive to the frequency detuning between qubits, which is hard to control accurately during fabrication. In the variation presented the control qubit is moved from first to second excited state during gate operation, then returned, and it is shown that this can enable a fast gate at larger detunings than otherwise possible. The approach discussed could help design fixed-frequency transmon devices which avoid frequency crowding while enabling fast gates.
