Prize Recipient

Aziza Suleymanzade
Harvard University

"For the development of a high efficiency, low noise mmwave photon to optical photon quantum transducer based upon Rydberg atoms in a first-of-its-kind seamless mmwave resonator."

Aziza was born in Azerbaijan and grew up in Russia, and, briefly, Pakistan. She got her undergraduate degree in Physics from Harvard in 2013, working on experimental high-energy physics with Melissa Franklin. After graduation, she got her MPhil from the University of Cambridge as a Harvard-Cambridge scholar, working in the lab of Zoran Hadzibabic, where she built a system for conducting potassium-39 BEC experiments in a uniform box potential. She got her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2021 in the labs of Jonathan Simon and David Schuster after developing a hybrid quantum platform with Rydberg atoms in optical and superconducting microwave cavities. Starting from an empty lab, Aziza, together with the team, built a first-of-a-kind hybrid experiment and started exploring the use of mm-wave photons in cavity- and circuit-QED platforms. This work culminated with a demonstration of transduction between single optical and mmwave photons in cavities mediated by Rydberg atoms. Aziza is currently a postdoc in the group of Mikhail Lukin at Harvard, working on quantum networks with solid-state defects in nanophotonic cavities.