Joost Bus

Hi, I’m Joost! I’m a PhD student in quantum optomechanics at ETH Zurich’s Nanophotonic Systems Laboratory, where I study the interaction between light and mechanical motion, combining levitated nanoparticles with integrated photonics. I’m drawn to one question that has followed me across different platforms: how do physical systems carry information and can we utilise it? I also really enjoy the fabrication side of this pursuit: how to actually build interesting and useful nanoscale systems.

Those interests run through most projects I’ve worked on in the last few years. During my master’s in the Hybrid Quantum Systems group at ETH, I fabricated and measured electromechanical systems in the quantum regime where information is encoded in mechanical motion. As a resident at Xanadu in Toronto, I developed software with the architecture team for FlamingPy, their photonic quantum-error-correction simulator, and wrote a demo on measurement-based quantum computation. At Extropic in Québec, I explored thermodynamic computing with superconducting circuits, where thermal fluctuations themselves become the computational resource (paper). There, I was responsible for the nanofabrication of our superconducting devices, and contributed to the device design and measurement. Now back in Zurich, I returned to mechanics and I’m adding light to my toolbox.

I grew up in Limburg, the Netherlands, and studied in Delft and Zurich. In my free time I like to collect elevation meters on foot or by bike 🚲. The best way to reach me is by email.