Paik, UMD Alum, Helped Build IBM’s First 16-qubit Quantum Computer

Hanhee Paik, a University of Maryland alum, was instrumental in building IBM’s first 16-qubit quantum computer in 2017, a significant development in the field. Paik also helped develop the transmon qubit, a superconducting qubit now widely adopted by numerous quantum computing companies. As director of IBM’s Quantum Algorithm Centers and Academic Collaboration Program, she now leads efforts to maximize the capabilities of increasingly powerful machines; “The IBM Quantum team’s mission is to build a useful quantum computer,” Paik said, adding that IBM has already demonstrated quantum advantage in three scientific applications this year.

Transmon Qubit Pioneering: Paik’s Work at UMD and Yale

The transmon qubit’s now-ubiquitous design owes a significant debt to Hanhee Paik’s research, which improved coherence times by a factor of 100 during her postdoctoral work at Yale University. Paik identified that energy loss at surfaces and interfaces caused rapid decoherence in early transmon qubits. She subsequently engineered a new architecture to minimize this effect by strategically altering energy storage locations within the qubit.

This innovation, developed while investigating decoherence, a process where qubits lose their quantum properties, directly addressed a central challenge limiting the potential of quantum computation. The resulting qubit design remains the standard for major companies like IBM, and Paik described it as “That design is still the canonical design that everyone uses for transmons today.” Paik’s contributions extended beyond theoretical improvements. She directly translated research into hardware as a senior research scientist at IBM starting in 2014.