Our group was succesfully granted the coordination of the project AVaQus (Annealing-based VAriational QUantum processorS), one of 49 projects selected by the European Commission to receive the FET-Open grant in the 2019 call. The project consortium brings together European research groups and companies to develop a quantum processor based on superconducting quantum circuits in order to demonstrate coherent quantum annealing and its potential to solve real-life optimization problems.
AVaQus is the first European-funded large-scale project on quantum annealing and it will lead to the consolidation of quantum annealing hardware as a research field in Europe, and potentially as a future European quantum technology.
This week, we had two visitors from Germany at IFAE. On Tuesday, February 18, Ioan Pop from KIT gave a talk on “Ionizing Radiation: A Dominant Source of Non-Equilibrium Quasiparticles in Superconducting Quantum Circuits”. A day later on Wednesday, February 19, Frank Wilhelm from Saarland University presented the European roadmap for quantum computing with his talk “Quantum computing - state of play, prospects, and a European perspective”. We thank both of them for their very interesting presentations!
Today, we welcome Barkay Guttel from Université Grenoble Alpes onboard. He is joining our team to work on superconducting qubits for his Master thesis. Previously, he did his BSc in Physics and Mathematics at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology. His interest is quantum information and quantum computation, more specifically using superconducting qubits.