Quantum leaps in Canadian facilities enable nanoscale device building

Adam Wei Tsen has been appointed an Endowed Chair in Nanotechnology at Waterloo, a position he will hold for five years with potential for renewal, recognizing his research bridging materials science and device engineering. Tsen’s team engineers heterostructures by stacking two-dimensional quantum materials, creating devices intended to outperform traditional systems in electronic, magnetic, or optical functions. Tsen states that the university’s unique nanotechnology infrastructure and collaborative strengths are essential to fabricating devices on an extremely small scale. This appointment signals continued institutional investment in nanoscale device building and interdisciplinary research. Two-Dimensional Quantum Materials Enable Heterostructure Engineering Tsen’s team constructs these layered materials by stacking atomically thin materials, tailoring their properties to create devices demonstrating novel electronic, magnetic, and optical functionalities that, in some cases, exceed the performance of conventional systems. This precise construction demands capabilities beyond standard materials research, requiring electrical contacts to be formed on materials measured in microns. The success of this interdisciplinary work relies heavily on collaborative expertise; Tsen explains, “Someone from a purely chemistry or physics background might not have a lot of exposure to devices and circuits. Someone from an engineering background might not know much about solid-state materials.” His team integrates researchers from chemistry, physics, and engineering, and their combined skills are crucial for navigating the complexities of both fundamental materials science and practical device engineering. This approach allows for adaptation of techniques developed for two-dimensional systems to other materials, including bulk crystals and thin films, broadening the scope of potential applications. “We need to use the nanofabrication facilities to make electrical contacts and build complex heterostructures. Without that infrastructure, we wouldn’t be able to do the things that we do at all.” He further emphasizes the importance of bridging traditionally separate research communities, asserting, “I think our work can connect the materials, nanotechnology, quantum, and device communities more broadly.” The combination of specialized facilities and a diverse research team positions Waterloo as a key hub for nanoscale device development and quantum materials research. The nanotechnology infrastructure here is quite unique in Canada.

Adam Wei Tsen, Associate Professor in Chemistry and faculty at the Institute for Quantum Computing Source: https://uwaterloo.ca/science/news/building-bridges-nanoscale More like thisDeep TechBristol and NQCC launch intensive quantum computing coursesQuantum Research NewsResearchers Bound Non-Local Parity Prediction AccuracyDeep TechHands-on quantum learning coming to schools with new EPFL projectQuantum Research NewsResearchers Prepare Logarithmic-Qubit States with Efficient CircuitsStay currentSee today’s quantum computing news on Quantum Zeitgeist for the latest breakthroughs in qubits, hardware, algorithms, and industry deals. Tags: Ivy Delaney Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing.

For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release. Latest Posts by Ivy Delaney: QCi tackles quantum security hurdles at ECOC 2026 exhibition September 18, 2026 No manual tuning needed, Qualibrate calibrates qubits from cold start September 18, 2026 NIST will fund cybersecurity training in eight states with $1.7 million September 18, 2026