Author: Andrew See

Appointment of ANFF Chief Executive Officer

Dr Ian Griffiths has been appointed as the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF), commencing this quarter. The decision was announced by ANFF’s Chairman and Board on 8 July 2019, following an extensive fourmonth search.

Dr Griffiths is currently CEO of Wound Innovations Pty Ltd, a spinout from the Wound Management Innovation Cooperative Research Centre of which he was Director and CEO. Over an extensive career in Australia and the UK he has successfully established companies based on new technologies and worked with universities, industry and government in fostering high-end research and innovation.

As CEO of ANFF, Dr Griffiths will provide leadership and oversight to the eight ANFF nodes that are spread across Australia. Based primarily in Brisbane, QLD, Dr Griffiths will work with the ANFF team to ensure that ANFF and the 500+ micro and nanofabrication capabilities in its open access portfolio continue to enable ground-breaking research.

Discussing his new role, Dr Ian Griffiths said: “I am delighted and honoured to be chosen as the CEO for ANFF. Having met and discussed ANFF with node directors and the Governing Board I can see enormous potential for the organisation and its importance as a National resource. I hope to be able to build on the solid work that has been undertaken so far.”

Commenting on the appointment, ANFF’s Chairman, Emeritus Professor Chris Fell AM said: “Ian was chosen after a wide search and will bring to ANFF extensive experience in advanced manufacturing, including the development of novel materials, nano-lithography, ion deposition, a range of laser-based processing technologies and fabrication of medical devices.

“In particular, Ian’s expertise in fabrication and advanced manufacturing will enhance ANFF’s ability to improve the technological readiness level of the projects it supports and aid in capturing the benefits of Australia’s world-class research in nano- and micro-technology.”

ANFF supports the R&D activities of 3,000 Australian researchers drawn from universities, CSIRO and industry. It was established by and is supported under the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy and has eight nodes around Australia that support activities ranging from quantum computing through to medical prosthetics and devices, sensors, photonic communication technology and advanced materials. It enables the development of prototypes and advanced manufacturing processes

UNSW community recognised in Queen’s Birthday honours

After being named Australian of the Year in 2018, UNSW Scientia Professor Michelle Simmons has become an Officer of the Order of Australia.

The UNSW media release link can be found here:
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/general/unsw-community-recognised-queen%E2%80%99s-birthday-honours

UNSW researchers tasked to locate leaks in the Sydney Water network

UNSW researchers, and founders of Zedelef – François Ladouceur and Leonardo Silvestri have been successful in securing $237K from Sydney Water to test whether their optical acoustic telemetry technology can accurately pinpoint leaks in the city’s water pipes.

An estimated 10% of water is lost daily from Sydney Water mains and this research effort is part of a wider $3.2M project led by the NSW Smart Sensing Network (NSNN) to find better ways to detect and fix leaking pipes, funded by Sydney Water, NSW Government and various utilities. The project involves industrial partners Zedelef Pty Ltd and Thales Underwater Systems

The optoelectronics transducers used as the core tech for the project is partially made at ANFF-NSW. Zedelef Pty Ltd is a startup company created to commercialise technologies developed by its three founders from the University of New South Wales – François Ladouceur, Leonardo Silvestri, and Zourab Brodzeli.

Zedelef website: https://zedelef.com.au/wp/

GOVERMENT NEWS media release: https://www.governmentnews.com.au/sydney-waters-anti-leak-pipe-dream/

UNSW media release link: https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/unsw-researchers-tasked-locate-leaks-sydney-water-network-0

Fidelity benchmarks for two-qubit gates in silicon

For the first time ever, researchers have measured the fidelity – that is, the accuracy – of two-qubit logic operations in silicon, with highly promising results that will enable scaling up to a full-scale quantum processor.The research, carried out by Professor Andrew Dzurak’s team in UNSW Engineering, was published today in the world-renowned journal Nature.

The experiments were performed by Wister Huang, a final-year PhD student in Electrical Engineering, and Dr Henry Yang, a senior research fellow at UNSW. The silicon qubit device that was used in this study was fabricated entirely at UNSW using a novel silicon-CMOS process line, high-resolution patterning systems, and supporting nanofabrication equipment that are made available by ANFF-NSW. The media release article can be found here.

Silicon quantum dot qubits reach a new record accuracy

Dr Henry Yang and colleagues, from the UNSW School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications, have published this week a new paper in Nature Electronics which reports a new world-record fidelity (or accuracy) for a quantum-dot-based silicon qubit. The fidelity of 99.96% corresponds to an error of only 0.04%, making it ideal for quantum error correction protocols that will be needed for full-scale universal quantum computing, required to solve some of the world’s grand challenges in areas as diverse as human health and climate change.

The paper [link] is featured on the cover of the April issue of Nature Electronics [link] and is accompanied by a News & Views article [link] describing the significance of the result by world expert in quantum control techniques, Prof Joe Emerson, from the Institute of Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Canada. An article featured in The Australian can be found here.

Dr Yang has also written a Nature Research Community article, telling the story Behind the Paper at [link]

The project and paper involved collaboration between Dr Yang and the broader group of Prof Andrew Dzurak at UNSW, with the quantum information theory team led by Profs Stephen Bartlett and Steve Flammia at the University of Sydney. The isotopically-enriched silicon-28 wafers used to make the devices were provided by Prof Kohei Itoh of Keio University in Japan.

The devices used for this study were all fully fabricated at the ANFF-NSW clean-room facility, using its full suite of silicon-MOS process tools and advanced electron-beam lithography.