Welcome to the 76th episode of Decode Quantum. In our series of episodes recorded in Lindau where dozens of physics Nobel laureates meet with young scientists, we picked a few of them who are specialized in the broad field of quantum computing to head their thoughts about it, Caroline Tornow, Francesca Pietracaprina, Yaroslav Herasymenko and Adam Shaw.

This podcast was recorded on July 1st, 2024, in Lindau, Germany during the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings 2024 with Fanny Bouton (OVHcloud) and Olivier Ezratty.

Caroline Tornow is from ETH Zurich and just started a PhD in the Condensed Matter Theory and Metamaterials group. Beforehand, during her Master’s in Quantum Engineering at ETH, she worked in the Quantum Computational Science group at IBM Research Zurich and the Quantum Information Theory group at ETH. She therefore has some ideas on where we are with regards to the maturity of quantum computing in general, and, we would guess, also with superconducting qubits.

Francesca Pietracaprina is a software engineer and researcher at Algorithmiq, a quantum computing software company based in Helsinki Finland. She did her PhD in between statistical and quantum physics and two postdocs in Rome and Toulouse where she focused on localization in quantum systems, a phenomenon that involves a breakdown on thermalization in presence of strong disorder. She then obtained a Marie Curie fellowship with which she moved to Dublin and continued her research on quantum disordered systems and quantum thermodynamics. At Algorithmiq, she is focused on creating full stack solutions for drug discovery and simulation.

Yaroslav Herasymenko is a post-doc at TU Delft and at QuSoft in Amsterdam. He did his PhD at the University of Leiden. He currently works on the development of fermionic (in other words, of electrons) quantum simulations. He started to work in condensed matter theory and then became interested in math and computing methods of condensed matter. It drove him to the field of quantum computing. He is a native from Kyiv, Ukraine.

Adam Shaw has a PhD in physics in 2024 from Caltech, where he studied quantum computing with Rydberg atom arrays. He is part of the team who broke recent records with the control of 6,100 atoms using lasers, working on both experimental and theoretical aspects to these systems, working on gate fidelities, large scale quantum simulation, and showing how certain quantum errors can be erased. He is now a post-doc at Stanford, still working on cold-atoms computing.

More details and transcript on : https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/decode-quantum-with-young-scientists-at-lindau