Video: The First Catalan Quantum Computer

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Pol Forn from the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre

In this video from the 2018 BSC Annual Meeting, Pol Forn from the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre describes the QUANTIC group efforts to build the first Catalan quantum computer using superconducting devices, showing the first superconducting qubit ever measured in Spain.

QUANTIC is a joint venture between the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the University of Barcelona. The research directions are focused on performing quantum computation in a laboratory of superconducting quantum circuits and studying new applications for quantum processors.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It hosts MareNostrum 4, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe with 165,888 processors providing 11.1 Petaflops/s of processing power to scientific research.

The Quantic team June 2018. From left to right (back): Chris, Jose Ignacio, Carlos, Artur. From left to right (front): Katarzyna, Alba, Pol.

The University of Barcelona is the largest one in Barcelona, with over 60,000 students,  5,500 researchers and  2,000 staff members. The theory team of QUANTIC is integrated within the ICCUB (Institut de Ciències del Cosmos de la Universitat de Barcelona) within the Quantum Physics and Astrophysics Deparatment at the Physics Faculty of the University of Barcelona.

Currently, part of the experimental research is carried out at ICN2 (Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona campus in Bellaterra. The experimental team in QUANTIC collaborates with the Physics and Engineering of Nanodevices group at ICN2 led by Prof. Sergio O. Valenzuela to carry out the first generation of experiments with quantum devices.

Pol Forn leads the experimental team at QUANTIC (quantic.bsc.es). He has a background on superconducting quantum devices for quantum information applications and quantum optics. He obtained his PhD from TU Delft in 2010, with a study of superconducting flux qubits and the limits of the interaction strength to a superconducting resonator. He was then a postdoctoral researcher in the Kimble group at the California Institute of Technology working on interfacing cold atoms and photonic waveguides. In a second postdoctoral stage, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Computing in the University of Waterloo, working with Dr. C. M. Wilson and A. Lupascu on superconducting qubits interacting with propagating microwave fields. He is a partner at Entanglement Partners SL. In 2017 Pol was appointed a researcher at BSC to lead the experimental efforts to build a quantum processor using superconducting circuits. He is currently a Beatriu de Pinós fellow.

Pol develops the quantum processor that will be operational at BSC. He uses superconducting quantum circuits, which are one of the most promising platforms on which to perform quantum computation and quantum simulation. By engineering circuits with multiple qubits, quantum algorithms can be implemented to perform computation, simulation and optimizing problems. Together with the theory team at QUANTIC, Pol studies new applications for small-sized quantum processors.

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