The main auditorium of Berkeley Lab was almost full to hear about Quantum Computing from Shane Caldwell, Quantum Engineer at Rigetti, a Berkeley-based Quantum Computing start-up. The company has attracted a lot of interest recently (The Quantum Computer Factory That’s Taking on Google and IBM – Wired) with its quantum computing API, Forest, its Quantum Computing language, QUIL, and the python front-end made available to the world, pyquil.
The audience learned about the quantum logic gates, what they do, and have they are implemented (spoiler: it’s very difficult!) Here’s the video of of the event:
Here’s more about the speaker:
Shane obtained his PhD in nuclear physics from the University of Chicago in 2015. His dissertation was on a novel technique for beta-delayed neutron spectroscopy using trapped radioactive ions. Within days of defending his thesis he joined Rigetti Computing as a “postdoc,” and he is probably the only person who ever held that job title at the company. During his first month at Rigetti he spent his days in a very roomy closet in the back of an office suite on Telegraph Avenue, in which he became acquainted with a pile of microwave signal generators and analyzers. Six weeks after joining Rigetti he was performing his first qubit measurements in the company’s new lab on Heinz Avenue. These days he is working on proving a new superconducting qubit architecture for scaling Rigetti’s quantum chips beyond 8 qubits.
Pictures of the event are available here.