Engineering the Quantum with Superconducting Circuits
Over the last decades our field has moved from observing quantum effects with increasing precision, to controlling quantum systems of increasing complexity. Arguably, building a fault-tolerant quantum computer is the ultimate demonstration of quantum control. It is also one of the greatest engineering challenges of our time. In this talk I will discuss the possibility of a hardware approach to fault-tolerance using superconducting quantum circuits. That is, encoding quantum information into cleverly designed circuits that offer some passive protection from noise. I will argue that the natural language for talking about robust encodings in superconducting circuits is that of “bosonic codes.” The hope is that using such encodings will alleviate some of the daunting software and hardware demands for fault-tolerance, making the task of building a quantum computer a little bit easier.