Office Hours with… Michael Hatridge

As the fall semester approached, Michael Hatridge eagerly waited for his lab to arrive from its old home at the University of Pittsburgh. In the meantime, Hatridge, who’d officially moved into his office in the Becton Center, was able to do theoretical work in the meantime.

“But I really love the tinkering more — I’m not in it for the paperwork,” he said. “I really love to be in the lab.”

In his work, Hatridge, a new member of the faculty at Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science, finds ways to expand the capabilities of quantum computing. One focus is optimizing how qubits — the units of information in quantum computing — communicate with each other. These qubits possess properties that enable quantum computers to potentially make calculations orders of magnitude faster than what is possible on classical supercomputers.

In the latest edition of “Office Hours,” a Q&A series that introduces new Yale faculty members to the broader community, the associate professor of applied physics discusses his research, how failure figures into it, and why he named the refrigerators in his lab after Looney Tunes characters.

What’s the overall mission of your lab?

Michael Hatridge: The goal right now is to build quantum circuits that are big enough and strange enough to push quantum computing forward. There are certain well-known platforms that are followed by places like IBM and Google. That route was picked 10 years ago, but it’s very inefficient and cannot be the best way. That way, the quantum computer is very far away.

At the same time, though, I’m not going to build thousand-bit machines here in the laboratory. But I might build 10-bit and 20-bit machines, so we can capture enough of the complexity to convince people that this is the way to build a quantum computer and show somebody at a big company that this is a viable route. So that’s why “big,” but also “strange,” because you don’t want to end up in a stern chase with a giant company with hundreds of people at it.

I assume there’s a lot of failure in your work, so what’s it like when something works out?

Hatridge: Yes. My fridges are named after Quixotic heroes. Deliberately, because I told my graduate students that it’s a better way of understanding the path that they’re on: You’re not on some heroic journey, you’re really tilting at windmills. So one fridge is named Wile E. Coyote, and our new one is named the Brain [of “Pinky and the Brain,” whose world-domination plans were regularly foiled]. I find this a productive way to think about graduate school. You want them to dream big, try to do things that are going to be straining. One of the great things about graduate students is they don’t have this fixed way of looking at stuff that comes from doing it for a really long time. So it’s really awesome when they see through a problem that you’ve thought about a certain way, and you missed part of it.

How do you get your ideas?

Hatridge: I don’t know exactly how they come about, but we haven’t run out of ideas yet. One thing that happened during COVID that turned out to be really productive was we had to become theorists for a while. I went back to the drawing board and re-examined some of the accepted wisdom of the field.

You had to rethink your projects when you’re locked in your house. I have a lot of students who love getting in the lab and working with their hands, but one of the good things that came out of it was forcing us to sit and think.

What do you do when you’re not working?

Hatridge: It’s been a little while since I was worried about what to do in my spare time. I golf very badly a little. I read books a lot. I’m not super picky — history, science fiction, whatever. I tend to read fast, so it’s not like I’m carefully picking which book. When you’re stuck on airplanes or whatever, I always have my Kindle. Well, now I have my phone. I missed my real books, but once I switched to the Kindle, life got a lot simpler.