Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 & H2020 Projects

• Program: H2020

• Type: ERC

• Project acronym: ECLIPSE

• Project title: Exotic superconducting CIrcuits to Probe and protect quantum States of light and mattEr

• Duration: 2019-

• Coordinator: Zaki Leghtas, Mines Paristech

• Program: H2020

• Type: Quantera

• Project acronym: QuCos

• Project title: Quantum Computation with Schrödinger cat states

• Duration: 2019-

• Coordinator: Gerhard Kirchmair, University of Innsbruck, Austria.

• Inria contacts: Zaki Leghtas and Mazyar Mirrahimi

• Other partners: ENS Lyon (France), Karlsruhe Institut of Technology (Germany), Quantum Machines (Israel), National Institute for Research and Development of Isotopic and Molecular Technologies, Romania.

• Abstract: This project seeks to establish a radically new, alternative approach to realizing the fundamental building blocks of quantum computers with superconducting qubits. In the next 3 years, we plan to employ only a handful of realistic components to realize robust error-corrected logical quantum bits. We aim to demonstrate the same level of protection provided by a few hundreds of qubits (with properties beyond the state of the art) in today’s mainstream approach of the so-called surface code architecture. Our alternative approach is known as cat codes, because it employs multiple interconnected high coherence cavity modes with non-linear dissipation, to encode a qubit in superpositions of Schrödinger cat states. Our project combines realizing the quantum processor architecture as well as the control system and the protocols that drive it, building towards a full-stack error-corrected quantum computer. The partners in our collaboration form a strong synergetic group that has the full range of expertise needed to design and realize these systems, and to obtain these challenging goals. Furthermore, all partners of our project, including both industry and academia, have worked together and published works in the fields of quantum computing and quantum information processing. We aim to implement error protected qubits, fault tolerant operations, and demonstrate the scalability of this approach by realizing a repetition code. Our project will enable quantum experiments towards the ambitious and well-defined goal of constructing a logical qubit, on which we can perform gates, and most importantly, quantum error-correction (QEC).

Collaborations with Major European Organizations

• Partner 1: ENS Lyon

• We are pursuing our interdisciplinary work about quantum control from theoretical aspects in direct collaboration with existing experiments (ENS Lyon) with the group of Benjamin Huard, former member of the QUANTIC team. Joint papers are published and underway. The ANR-JCJC project HAMROQS by Alain Sarlette has Benjamin Huard as external supporting collaborator.

• Partner 2: Laboratoire Kastler Brossel

• We have been continuing collaborations with the teams of Samuel Deleglise and Igor Dotsenko from Laboratoire Kastler Brossel on the theoretical analysis of their experiments.

• Partner 3: Ghent University.

• Alain Sarlette has been collaborating with applied mathematicians interested in quantum control at UGent in the framework of thesis co-supervisions. One PhD student has successfully defended his thesis this year (Zhifei Zhang).