Topics & People

Former leader of Venezuela, recently deposed in a highly precise US raid.

Former president of Venezuela who came to power in 1999 using a populist narrative. He initiated the socialist regime that nationalized industries and centralized power in the state.

Venezuela
Location

Country where a recent US-backed regime change operation took out Nicolas Maduro.

Venezuelan opposition leader, winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, and the primary winner of the 2023 presidential primary election. She was disqualified from running in the general election by the Maduro regime.

Highly sensitive devices used in fields like astronomy to detect faint signals. Martinis finds this application, which is related to his own work with superconductors, particularly interesting for searching for exoplanets.

A type of quantum computer built from superconducting circuits, utilizing technologies like Josephson junctions to create qubits. This is the approach pioneered by John Martinis and his colleagues.

A US government agency where John Martinis worked after his postdoc in France and before his time at UCSB.

A colleague and dear friend of John Martinis from France, with whom Martinis worked during his postdoctoral studies.

A critical challenge in quantum computing. Qubits are inherently noisy and lose their state quickly, requiring complex error correction schemes to build a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, potentially needing a million physical qubits.

IBM
Organization

A multinational technology corporation actively investing in securing open-source code.

A milestone demonstrated by John Martinis's team at Google in 2019, where a quantum computer performed a specific calculation that is practically impossible for even the most powerful classical supercomputers.

UCSB
Organization

The University of California, Santa Barbara, where John Martinis was a professor for about 10 years, building up a lab that created 5 and 9-qubit quantum computers before moving to Google.