Home develops trapped-ion control and oscillator encodings, helping demonstrate a logical grid-state qubit and correction cycles that prolong information stored in an ion’s motion.
Home’s experimental work explores how a single oscillator can carry a protected logical qubit. His collaborations first prepared and controlled grid states in the motion of a trapped calcium ion, then demonstrated correction of small shifts in position and momentum. This connects a mathematical encoding to the physical operations needed to maintain it. The results are significant steps in quantum control and error correction, with their scope limited to the particular encoded systems and procedures tested.
Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, Caltech
California Institute of Technology · United States
Kitaev developed foundational approaches to protecting quantum information, including computation with anyons and the oscillator encoding now known as the Gottesman–Kitaev–Preskill code.
Kitaev’s work changes how quantum information can be represented and protected. His anyon construction connects fault-tolerant operations to the structure of a two-dimensional quantum system. With Gottesman and Preskill, he also showed how a discrete logical qubit could be embedded in a continuous-variable oscillator and protected against small shifts. These ideas provide architectural building blocks across different hardware programs. They are theoretical constructions whose physical realization requires additional experimental control and error-management work.
Chief Technology Officer and cofounder, Alice & Bob
Alice & Bob
Lescanne helped demonstrate cat-qubit protection against bit flips and cofounded Alice & Bob to develop superconducting hardware that uses this asymmetry between error types.
Lescanne’s research explores whether hardware can suppress one class of errors before a larger correction code is applied. His collaborative cat-qubit experiment encoded information in a superconducting resonator stabilized by two-photon dissipation. Increasing the separation of its states suppressed bit flips, while phase flips still required attention. Alice & Bob’s history links that work to its 2020 founding. His contribution thus spans an experimentally tested protection mechanism and the attempt to develop it into a computing architecture.
John G. Braun Professor of Applied Physics and Physics; Director of Quantum Hardware, AWS
Caltech / Amazon Web Services · United States
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.
Builds quantum hardware around cat qubits, connecting experimental suppression of selected errors in an oscillator with Alice & Bob’s effort to develop fault-tolerant superconducting computers.
Peronnin’s contribution begins with a concrete physical result: a coauthored experiment showed that an oscillator encoding could suppress bit flips exponentially as its encoded states were separated. That bias changes how error correction can be designed, although the remaining errors still require protection. Co-founding Alice & Bob with Raphaël Lescanne brought this approach into a company focused on quantum computing. His inclusion recognizes the connection between experimental research and sustained system development, without treating a proposed scalable architecture as already complete.
Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics
California Institute of Technology · United States
Develops the theory of reliable quantum information processing, from oscillator error-correcting codes to the language used to assess what noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers can realistically accomplish.
Preskill’s work combines concrete methods for protecting quantum information with a widely used framework for discussing the field’s development. The Gottesman–Kitaev–Preskill construction encodes a discrete qubit in a continuous-variable oscillator and supplies an approach to correcting displacement errors. His NISQ-era paper then examines what becomes possible before comprehensive error correction is available. The connection is practical: understanding the promise of near-term machines requires understanding what noise prevents them from doing. Neither contribution depends on a particular company’s hardware roadmap.
Designs quantum operations and error-correction methods that exploit structured noise, linking the theory of cat-qubit gates with experimental stabilization, control and measurement of superconducting oscillator qubits.
Puri’s work asks how a qubit’s physical noise can shape the design of a reliable computer. Her bias-preserving-gate research develops operations that maintain an advantageous error structure instead of destroying it during computation. The Kerr-cat experiment supplies a complementary physical demonstration, combining stabilization, gates and readout in a superconducting oscillator. These contributions connect device behavior with fault-tolerant architecture. They support an approach to reducing the demands of error correction under stated assumptions, rather than eliminating errors altogether.
