University of Illinois Chicago students write the book on automating diamond membrane creation for quantum devices

The Break Through Tech Chicago initiative enables six UIC students to develop a process that will accelerate the creation of quantum materials at the Q-NEXT quantum research center.

There’s something exhilarating about tackling a problem for which there is no manual. You get to explore the problem’s subtleties, perfect the procedure and write the playbook. 

Six undergraduates at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) have been writing the playbook for a process that will help accelerate the creation of materials that host qubits — the fundamental units of quantum information — specifically, membranes made of diamond.

The development of diamond membranes for quantum technologies is an important area of research at Q-NEXT, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory. During the students’ 10-week internship at Argonne, they contributed to Q-NEXT by writing software to automate one of the more intensively manual parts of diamond-membrane production.

“We’re doing work that has a possibility to change so many different things as we know them. It’s innovative, it’s thinking into the future.” — Aima Qutbuddin, UIC

For the students, the experience was equal parts challenging, illuminating and fulfilling.

“This experience has turned out really great for me,” said Lisette Ruano, a junior in computer science. ​“I was nervous to begin it, because I thought it was more about science and less about computers. But it involves lots of computer science, and I’ve learned a lot about other areas of science working on this project. I’m very proud of all the work we’ve done.”

Their work is enabled through Break Through Tech Chicago, an initiative that provides women and nonbinary people with internship opportunities in science and technology. Argonne staff scientist Nazar Delegan, a Q-NEXT collaborator, and UIC professor Dale Reed led the student team.

Quantum information technologies are expected to revolutionize areas such as logistics, drug development and navigation in the coming decades. Diamond membranes are a new material for hosting qubits, the core of quantum devices. The membranes have desirable properties for quantum information processing, and they open paths for integrating quantum materials with current information technologies.

Scientists are investigating the most effective ways to fabricate diamond membranes. One of the production steps — a specific process in the etching stage — requires up to 60 minutes of continual human effort and supervision.

The task before the UIC students: Put that etching process on the path to full automation. 

“There are factors that can disrupt the etching process. Someone has to constantly be checking that it’s being done right,” said Fernanda Villalpando, an information decision sciences senior and the group’s project manager. ​“So we worked to automate it.”

By demonstrating proof of concept, the students laid the groundwork for the procedure so that future researchers can scale it up to industry production levels.

The membranes are created by embedding a layer of graphite between two layers of diamond. The thick bottom diamond layer serves as a platform. The tissue-thin top layer — 100 to 1,000 nanometers thin, a hundred to a thousand times thinner than a sheet of paper — is the diamond membrane. Scientists use electrical probes to chemically etch away the graphite beneath the membrane, which can then be peeled off and integrated into a quantum device.

Currently, a human must watch over the roughly hour-long etching process to ensure its successful execution. But following the UIC group’s work, researchers will one day be able to say goodbye to human-supervised etching.

“Because we’re doing such foundational work, it’s exciting that people are going to expand on the knowledge that we’ve provided for them and realize the potential of what that could become,” said Aima Qutbuddin, a computer science junior.

Building on image detection software called Open CV as part of the Python programming language, the students created a program to teach the computer to visually assess and respond to the etching process. Is there a bubble trapped between layers? An unexpected obstruction? With the UIC group’s program, the computer knows whether to stop the etch, continue or work around it.

“That way, the scientists don’t have to be there to push the ​‘off’ button, for example,” Villalpando said. ​“Our program stops it for them.”

As the ones spearheading the procedure, the team had no blueprint for how to proceed. They quickly realized they’d have to draw heavily on their computer science knowledge, hunt for relevant documentation and even pick up the phone to call the device’s manufacturer for minutiae not captured in the literature.

“When we were starting, we couldn’t make our software communicate with the device. It was difficult finding the documentation,” said Andrea Muñoz, a computer science senior.

“We had to reach out to the company. It was a little frustrating, because how were we going to do the rest of the work if we’re having trouble communicating with the devices?” said Claudia Jimenez, a computer science junior. ​“But once we got that part, we had the persistence and resilience to keep going, and made a lot of progress in two or three weeks. We kept going and looked for different resources to accomplish something that none of us had ever done before.”

In fact, it was something no one had done before. Currently, only a select few groups in the world are creating diamond-membrane qubit platforms.

“I love being in a space where everyone is excited about it,” Villalpando said. ​“I’ve been in rooms where people do the work that they do all the time. It’s not new, and there’s only one way to do it. But we get to be creative and think, ​‘How can we solve this?’”

For Q-NEXT, the group’s development of a technical procedure from scratch was a crucial contribution to quantum materials fabrication. For the students, it was part of the real-world work of experimenting in a laboratory.

“When we started, I didn’t have any experience with image detection. But now I feel like I’ve used it a good amount. We figured out ways that worked for us on how to conquer this because it was such a big project. We sometimes had to divide into teams, and then we would come together,” Ruano said.

The Chicago Quantum Exchange honored the group’s work with the Best Undergraduate Student Poster Award at the Chicago Quantum Summit in October. 

“When I was first learning about the opportunity, I was very unsure of what I was going to do, because quantum is such a big field,” said Lisset Rico, a computer science senior. ​“I didn’t know that national laboratories existed. They do fully funded research for the nation. This experience has definitely given me an insight into the work that scientists in the field do currently. It’s always good to be open to new experiences.”

The UIC team was also excited to be part of game-changing research that could have impacts across so many areas of everyday life.

“Quantum applies to so many different applications and fields and industries. I would possibly like to be a part of that. It was nice to hear from actual professionals in the field giving an explanation about what quantum is, how it can be applied and how we’re actually going to do it,” Jimenez said.

“We’re doing work that has a possibility to change so many different things as we know them,” Qutbuddin said. ​“It’s innovative, it’s thinking into the future.”

This work was supported by DOE’s Office of Science National Quantum Information Science Research Centers as part of the Q-NEXT center.

About Q-NEXT

Q-NEXT is a U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by Argonne National Laboratory. Q-NEXT brings together world-class researchers from national laboratories, universities and U.S. technology companies with the goal of developing the science and technology to control and distribute quantum information. Q-NEXT collaborators and institutions have established two national foundries for quantum materials and devices, develop networks of sensors and secure communications systems, establish simulation and network test beds, and train the next-generation quantum-ready workforce to ensure continued U.S. scientific and economic leadership in this rapidly advancing field. For more information, visit https://​q​-next​.org/.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.