On Monday February 12th, Quantbot had the opportunity to facilitate this month’s NYC Quantum Computing meetup in our office. This month’s presenter, Mani Chandra from nOhm, presented about “Efficient non-Ohmic Charge Transport in Two-dimensional semiconductors.”

Mani Chandra is the CEO of nOhm Devices, a new startup at MIT. He has a PhD in high-energy astrophysics from the University of Illinois. Some of his achievements include being awarded the Astronomy Department’s Chu award for research excellence and the Illinois Distinguished Fellow from the Urbana- Champaign.

Many people showed up to tonight’s talk and were able to collaborate and share their thoughts on the topic.

Here is a synopsis of tonight's presenation: Charge transport in semiconductors is usually diffusive (“Ohmic”) due to electrons scattering off defects and phonons, as described by the textbook Ohm’s law. However, in sufficiently clean two-dimensional materials, Ohm’s law breaks down and gives rise to novel “non-Ohmic” charge transport regimes wherein electrons flow like a fluid. These novel regimes - ballistic and hydrodynamic transport - allow for the creation of highly-efficient electronic devices, with much lower power consumption and heat dissipation compared to current generation electronics (which are based on field-effect transistors). I will present an overview of transport physics in semiconductors and talk about our efforts to use non-Ohmic charge transport to design highly-efficient readout electronics that can be co-located with qubits and various quantum sensors in the innermost cryostage of dilution refrigerators, where the cooling power is limited to ~1 mW. The resulting integrated cryogenic electronics will enable the scaling up of quantum systems, similar to the historical progression from discrete transistors to integrated circuits.