Oskar Painter

Connects precision control of light and mechanical motion with superconducting quantum hardware, including the cat-qubit approach used by AWS to explore lower-overhead quantum error correction.

Painter’s contributions join the control of quantum physical systems with the engineering of a computing architecture. His group’s micromechanical experiment generated squeezed light on a silicon device, showing how designed structures can manipulate optical noise. More recently, his AWS hardware program demonstrated the Ocelot cat-qubit chip with error correction. The two results operate at different levels, device physics and encoded computation. Ocelot is an experimental building block toward larger systems, with substantial engineering still required for useful fault-tolerant computing.