Steven Girvin

Steven Girvin's picture
Sterling Professor of Physics
YQI 403
+1 (203) 432-5082
steven.girvin@yale.edu
Research Website
CV
Research Areas: 
Condensed Matter Physics; Quantum Physics
Research Type: 
Theorist
Biographical Sketch: 

     Dr. Girvin joined the Yale faculty in 2001, where he is Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Professor of Applied Physics.  From 2007 to 2017, he served as Deputy Provost for Research.  In that role, he helped oversee research and strategic planning in the basic sciences and engineering across the university.  He also helped oversee entrepreneurship, innovation and tech transfer at Yale.  In 2017, Professor Girvin stepped down from his role as Deputy Provost to return full-time to teaching and research.

     After completing his undergraduate degree in physics from Bates College, Dr. Girvin earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University and Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden.  He went on to work as a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology from 1979 to 1987, before joining the faculty of Indiana University in 1987.

     Throughout his career, Professor Girvin’s research has focused on theoretical studies of quantum many-particle systems.  Since coming to Yale, his interests have moved to atomic physics, quantum optics and quantum computation. Professor Girvin’s academic research is currently focused on ‘circuit QED,’ the quantum physics of microwave electrical circuits using superconducting Josephson junctions as artificial atoms coupled to individual microwave photons.  He works closely with the experimental team at Yale led by Michel Devoret and Robert Schoelkopf developing circuit QED into a practical architecture for construction of a quantum computer.  A particular current interest is quantum error correction using bosonic codes.

     In recognition of his research and contributions to the field, Dr. Girvin has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.  In 2007, he and his collaborators, Allan H. MacDonald and James P. Eisenstein, were awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society, “For fundamental experimental and theoretical research on correlated many-electron states in low dimensional systems.”  In 2017, Professor Girvin received an honorary degree from Chalmers University of Technology in recognition of his work co-developing circuit QED.

Education: 
Ph.D., Princeton University, 1977; MS, University of Maine, 1973; BS, Bates College, 1971
Selected Publications: 
 
1. Teoh JD, Winkel P, Babla HK, Chapman BJ, Claes J, de Graaf SJ, Garmon JWO, Kalfus WD, Lu Y, Maiti A, Sahay K, Thakur N, Tsunoda T, Xue SH, Frunzio L, Girvin SM, Puri S, Schoelkopf RJ. Dual-rail encoding with superconducting cavities. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Oct 10;120(41):e2221736120. PubMed Central PMCID: PMC10576063.
2. Sivak VV, Eickbusch A, Royer B, Singh S, Tsioutsios I, Ganjam S, Miano A, Brock BL, Ding AZ, Frunzio L, Girvin SM, Schoelkopf RJ, Devoret MH. Real-time quantum error correction beyond break-even. Nature. 2023 Apr;616(7955):50-55. PubMed PMID: 36949196.
3. Lu Y, Maiti A, Garmon JWO, Ganjam S, Zhang Y, Claes J, Frunzio L, Girvin SM, Schoelkopf RJ. High-fidelity parametric beamsplitting with a parity-protected converter. Nat Commun. 2023 Sep 18;14(1):5767. PubMed Central PMCID: PMC10507116.
4. Tsunoda T, Teoh JD, Kalfus WD, de Graaf SJ, Chapman BJ, Curtis JC, Thakur N, Girvin SM, Schoelkopf RJ. Error-detectable bosonic entangling gates with a noisy ancilla. Physical Review X Quantum. 2023 June; 4:020354. Available from: https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PRXQuantum.4.020354 DOI: 10.1103/PRXQuantum.4.020354
5. Chou KS, Shemma T, McCarrick H, Chien T, Teoh JD, Winkel P, Anderson A, Chen J, Curtis J, de Graaf SJ, Garmon JWO, Gudlewski B, Kalfus WD, Keen T, Khedkar N, Lei CU, Liu G, Lu P, Lu Y, Maiti A, Mastalli-Kelly L, Mehta N, Mundhada SO, Narla A, Noh T, Tsunoda T, Xue SH, Yuan JO, Frunzio L, Aumentado J, Puri S, Girvin SM, Moseley SHarvey, Schoelkopf RJ. Demonstrating a superconducting dual-rail cavity qubit with erasure-detected logical measurements. Nature Physics. Forthcoming. Available from: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.03169 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2307.03169
6. Hann CT, Zou CL, Zhang Y, Chu Y, Schoelkopf RJ, Girvin SM, Jiang L. Hardware-Efficient Quantum Random Access Memory with Hybrid Quantum Acoustic Systems. Phys Rev Lett. 2019 Dec 20;123(25):250501. PubMed PMID: 31922763.
7. Royer B, Singh S, Girvin SM. Stabilization of Finite-Energy Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill States. Phys Rev Lett. 2020 Dec 31;125(26):260509. PubMed PMID: 33449723.
8. Blais A, Girvin SM, Oliver WD. Quantum information processing and quantum optics with circuit quantum electrodynamics. Nature Physics. 2020 March 02; 16:247. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0806-z
9. Weiss DK, Puri S, Girvin SM. Quantum Random Access Memory Architectures Using 3D Superconducting Cavities. PRX Quantum. 2024 April 16. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.5.020312 DOI: 10.1103/PRXQuantum.5.020312
10. Xu S, Hann CT, Foxman B, Girvin SM, Ding Y. Systems Architecture for Quantum Random Access Memory. MICRO ‘23: Proceedings of the 56th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture. 2023 October; :526. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613424.3614270 DOI: 10.1145/3613424.3614270