Rami Barends

Timeline

1. 2009

   A doctorate in Delft

   Raised in Delft, he studies physics there and earns his doctorate with a thesis on superconducting detectors, finished in 2009.

2. By 2014

   Qubits at UC Santa Barbara

   By 2014, he works on superconducting qubits in John Martinis's research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The group builds a first qubit, then a five-qubit system and later one with nine qubits, and studies error correction in quantum computations.

3. April 2014

   A five-qubit processor in Nature

   In April 2014, he coauthors a Nature paper from the physics department at UC Santa Barbara with John M. Martinis and others. The five-qubit superconducting processor reaches an average single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.92 per cent and a two-qubit gate fidelity of up to 99.4 per cent, at the threshold for surface code error correction.

4. 2014–2021

   Hardware at Google's Quantum AI lab

   In 2014, he and parts of the research group move to Google, and John Martinis becomes the company's top quantum researcher. As a researcher and project manager in the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, his work includes materials analysis, electronics and software development.

5. October 2019

   Sycamore and quantum supremacy

   In October 2019, Nature publishes "Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor", with him among the Google authors. The Sycamore processor samples one instance of a quantum circuit on 53 qubits a million times in about 200 seconds, and benchmarks put the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer at approximately 10,000 years. He is involved in developing the hardware for Sycamore.

6. July 2021

   Exponential error suppression in Nature

   In July 2021, Nature publishes "Exponential suppression of bit or phase errors with cyclic error correction", which lists him among its Google authors. Repetition codes on a grid of superconducting qubits reduce the logical error per round more than 100-fold as the number of qubits grows from 5 to 21.

7. 2021

   Director at Jülich

   In 2021, he leaves Google after more than ten years of research in the United States and joins the Peter Grünberg Institute at Forschungszentrum Jülich as head of Functional Quantum Systems (PGI-13). There he heads the construction of a low-temperature laboratory for the quantum computers of the European Quantum Flagship project.

8. As of October 2026

   Superconducting qubits at PGI-13

   Since 2021, he and his working group at Jülich develop quantum computers with as many superconducting qubits as possible, and he heads the centre's low-temperature laboratory. The mission of PGI-13 is to lay the technological and scientific foundations to enable useful quantum computing.