Jonathan Varghese

About Jonathan

My name is Jonathan Varghese, I am a UC Davis Applied Physics/Computer Science alumni. I have interests in ab initio quantum chemistry methods using QPUs, as well as interests in the physics of quantum computing hardware modalities. During my time at Davis, I worked in Prof. Nancy Aggarwal’s group, where we were building an experiment that used vacuum sealed, optically levitated nanoparticles to measure high frequency gravitational waves. I was tasked to redesign the existing layout of the experiment from its sister project based in Northwestern, and spent my time creating an application that allowed users to find mode matched solutions for optics setups. I would use this application to redesign the vacuum chamber using CAD in order to implement the adjustments required. My introduction to quantum computing was through a grad level course at Davis, EEC 289L: Quantum Information Science, where I was introduced to basic quantum computing theory, Dirac notation, Bloch spheres, quantum cryptography algorithms, and various modality designs. I also was an active member of Quantum Computing at Davis (QCaD) club, where students would convene for weekly discussions and peer lectures on quantum computing topics. Through this club I attended iQuHack in Jan 2025, an annual quantum hackathon hosted by MIT, where I studied and simulated the dynamics of cat qubits. Our team learned how to set up Fock states, create Wigner plots, and solve the Lindbladian Equations of these systems. It was to further explore these cat qubits and their implementations, I was recruited by Iff in August 2025.

Since joining Iff, I have been experimenting with ways to emulate cat qubit dynamics using non-bosonic modalities, and hope to use this to simulate open-system molecular dynamics. I have been working on finding ways to take the bosonic, non- unitary, non- Hermitian Hamiltonian of a cat qubit system and find ways to approximate this into a unitary gate that can be encoded onto a fermionic quantum circuitry. I am interested in studying whether this can be done, and documenting what the process of switching modalities entails. I am hoping to eventually find ways to encode a molecular basis onto this transpiled fermionic cat qubit system, and solve Lindbladians of molecules that are submerged in a bath environment, simulating real life biochemical environments. In addition to these explorations, I have been attempting to connect IFF with possible biotech collaborators worldwide, including in Karnataka, India. I have also been conducting market research on companies utilizing QPUs for ab initio quantum chemistry, what methods currently exist for doing so, and attempting to compile this research into an informal industry literature review to be published on our site.



I hope to work directly with quantum computing hardware in the future, and have interests in benchmarking the advantages specific modalities have for various use cases. I have also grown to be interested in ab initio, wavefunction based computational chemistry, and the implications quantum computing may have on the field. Please reach out to collaborate or discuss anything to do with quantum computing hardware, or even general photonics work.