Olivier Pfister PhD

Professor of Physics

University of Virginia

Olivier Pfister PhD featured image

Olivier Pfister received the B.S. in Physics from Université Côte d’Azur in 1987, and the M.S. and the Ph.D. in Physics from Sorbonne Paris-Nord Université in 1989 and 1993. In 1994, he was a lecturer at Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. He was a research associate with John L. Hall at JILA, University of Colorado (1994-97) and with Daniel J. Gauthier at Duke University (1997-99). In 1999, he joined the faculty of the University of Virginia, where he is a professor of physics with a courtesy appointment in electrical and computer engineering.  Olivier Pfister is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of Optica, IEEE, and SPIE. His general research area is quantum optics and quantum information, with a focus on quantum computing with continuous variables of light.

Presentation Title:

AI-driven, deterministic non-Gaussian resource generation for fully scalable photonic quantum computing

Presentation Abstract:

Photonic quantum computing (QC) over continuous variables (CV) has the most scalability promise of all known QC platforms (including qubit-based ones), leveraging deterministic Gaussian quantum state generation to produce record-scale CV cluster states which are a substrate for universal quantum computing. Reaching fault tolerance, however, will require the generation of non-Gaussian resources, e.g. Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) CV qubit encodings. While recent experimental progress has been made in generating GKP states, the process is still probabilistic and cannot scale without quantum memories. I will present recent theoretical results that show that deterministic non-Gaussian state generation is possible using deep reinforcement learning, which hints that hybrid AI-quantum circuits might lift this last scalability bottleneck.