Prize Recipient

Xiao came to the US in 2009 to pursue an undergraduate degree, having initially a predilection more toward the literary than the scientific. At Cornell University, his outlook was fundamentally altered by the experience of working with Professor John Reppy in the somewhat hapless field of supersolid helium, which taught him that toiling away in the machine shop can be as delightful as the bantering wit of Bernard Shaw. After graduating from Cornell in 2013, Xiao embarked on his graduate career working with Prof Jason Petta in Princeton University where he sought to integrate spin qubits in silicon gate-define quantum dots with microwave-frequency photons. In 2017, he made the world's first demonstrations of strong-coupling between a single electron charge in gate-define quantum dots and a single microwave-frequency photon. Shortly thereafter, the first experimental signature of strong-coupling between a single electron spin and a microwave photon was also reported by Xiao and Jason. These works have paved the foundation for long-range coupling and readout of spin-based qubits. Since 2018, Xiao has been a research scientist at Google where he works on benchmarking and algorithmic application of superconducting quantum processors. He is particularly proud of his recent success in seamlessly hanging up a wallpaper, which he declared to be more difficult than doing 16 lithography layers in nano-fabrication.