Nikolai Zhitkov

About me

I am a first-year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, advised by Gokul Ravi . My work centers on quantum computing, with an interest in the engineering challenges involved in scaling superconducting platforms toward fault tolerance.

Prior to joining the PhD program, I was a researcher at Bauman Moscow State Technical University's FMN Lab (now Shukhov Labs, Quantum Park). There, I developed discrimination methods for superconducting qubit readout under the supervision of Ilya A. Rodionov and Anton I. Ivanov .

Current research

My research focuses on using qubit readout soft information to improve the fidelity of Quantum Error Correction protocols. While standard readout discards valuable data by forcing hard binary decisions, utilizing soft information can boost decoding performance (see paper one , or paper two for a proof of the claim); however, this may come with high bandwidth and latency costs. I am currently working on architectural and algorithmic solutions to process richer soft information computationally effectively.

Contact

You can contact me by emailing zhitkov at umich (dot) edu.