Irfan Siddiqi

Irfan Siddiqi (born March 4, 1976) is an American physicist and currently a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley

Inspired by superconductivity and superconducting digital circuits during a summer internship at HYPRES, Inc., he enrolled at Yale University for his doctoral studies. His graduate work focused mainly on aluminum hot-electron bolometers for microwave astronomy. Upon receiving his Ph.D. in 2002,

His post-doctoral work resulted in the development of the Josephson Bifurcation Amplifier, which makes use of the non-dissipative, non-linear nature of the Josephson junction to realize high gain and minimal back action measurements of quantum systems. He joined the University of California, Berkeley as a faculty member in the summer of 2005, and is currently a full professor in the Physics Department. In 2015, his laboratory was awarded the UC Berkeley Award for Excellence in Laboratory Safety, awarded by the Berkeley Office of Environment, Health and Safety.

Siddiqi's research is mainly focused on the fields of quantum electrodynamics and cQED. His current research interests include quantum error correction, multi-partite entanglement generation, quantum simulation of high-correlated condensed matter and high-energy physics theories, and single photon detection.

Siddiqi was one of the five faculty recipients of the "2016 Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award", which is the University of California, Berkeley's most prestigious honor for teaching. In 2021, Siddiqi was awarded the Joseph F. Keithley Award For Advances in Measurement Science "for fundamental advances in superconducting parametric amplifiers, including the development of the Josephson traveling wave parametric amplifier, and for their application to quantum measurement and control."

As the director of the Advanced Quantum Testbed, Siddiqi and his team are on a mission to develop a digital quantum computer based on superconducting circuits to tackle fundamental science applications relevant to the US Department of Energy. The project aims to collaboratively advance the field by incorporating state-of-the-art quantum hardware into an open-access research tool for the science community.

Siddiqi resides with his family, including two children, in California.

Honors and awards Joseph F. Keithley Award For Advances in Measurement Science (2021) The Harding Bliss Prize, Yale University (2002) The Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations Citation (1997) Perkins Prize, Lowell House Harvard University (1997)

Notable publications