Bio:

Antoine Gras received an engineering graduate from Ecole Polytechnique in 2002 and graduated from Ecole des Mines de Paris in 2005. From 2005 to 2009, he worked for the French Ministry of Industry in the area of industrial development. In 2009, he joined CEA-Liten (Grenoble, France) and held several responsibilities, including Program Manager for Organic Electronics, managing a technical project for the development of organic photodiodes. In 2014, he became production manager at ASTRON-FIAMM-SAFETY (Toulon, France), in charge of clean room operations for the manufacturing of OLED panels for lighting. In 2016, he joined the start-up Symbiose (Pugnac, France) as industrialization manager on In-Mold Electronics products. In 2020, he joined Alice&Bob (Paris, France) and is now Chief of Engineering, coordinating a team of engineers in charge of setting up the infrastructure, software development, microwave design and nanofabrication.

Abstract:

Alice&Bob is dedicated to building a fault-tolerant quantum computer. By giving access to its exponential computation power to customers, it will allow to solve hard problems, like chemical simulation or combinatorial optimization. A key ingredient for such a computer is quantum error correction, which comes at a cost of hardware overhead. To limit this overhead, Alice&Bob develops an original approach based on “cat qubits”, a concept developed in the French academic ecosystem. Built on the standard toolbox of superconducting circuits, autonomously stabilized cat-qubits have demonstrated a first layer of error correction, suppressing bit-flips exponentially with average photon number at a linear cost in phase-flips. The necessary concatenation with a repetition code to correct against phase-flip is the next step toward a first “logical” qubit.
After briefly introducing Alice&Bob and the cat qubit approach, this talk will discuss the current status of the technology, the different milestones toward a fault tolerant quantum computer, and the associated engineering challenges.