Discovery Park to host Sandia National Labs speaker

Rick Muller
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Discovery Park will host a Quantum Information Seminar featuring Rick Muller, manager of the Computational Materials and Data Science Department at Sandia National Laboratories, at 1-2 p.m. Monday (Nov. 5) in Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, Room 121.

Muller will be presenting an overview of research that Sandia National Laboratories has pursued in the science and engineering of quantum information systems (QIS). Sandia’s work in QIS spans computing, sensing and communications applications. In quantum computing, Sandia has focused on the design, fabrication and measurement of a variety of qubit technologies and has developed tools to model qubits and their associated support architectures, as well as tools to characterize the performance of qubits and collections of qubits.

In quantum sensing, Sandia has focused on a suite of capabilities around cold atom technologies to improve magnetometry and accelerometry beyond classical limitations. In quantum communications, Sandia has developed on-chip implementations of quantum key distribution hardware. Muller will briefly describe these research areas and will discuss areas of potential collaboration with Purdue scientists.

Muller has a B.A. in chemistry from Rice University, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from California Institute of Technology. Muller did postdoctoral research in enzyme catalysis with Arieh Warshel at University of Southern California, and then returned to Caltech to help manage industrial collaborations around catalysis and quantum chemistry in Goddard’s Materials Simulation Center. In 2003, he moved to Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work has explored multiscale modeling, simulation of battery materials, and modeling semiconductor quantum computing devices. In 2015-16, he worked in Washington, D.C., in the Joint Program Office for the National Strategic Computing Initiative, after which he returned to Sandia as manager of the Computational Materials and Data Sciences Department.

Source: Rick Muller, rmuller@sandia.gov