Harold Ollivier, a former student of France’s École Polytechnique, is currently a researcher in quantum computing at ENS (École Normale Supérieure) and heads the QuantumTech Program at INRIA, the French national research institute for digital science and technology. He has worked at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos laboratory, at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, and at the French Ministry of Economy and Finance’s Directorate General for Enterprise in Paris. He later joined an investment fund in SMEs before launching a software startup.
The rudimentary quantum technologies we have today have already had a profound impact on computer security and our ability to find solutions to certain types of challenging problems. But to turn these into real and impacting applications, researchers need to develop robust, error-free quantum computers. Quantum computers, which exploit the “spooky” physics of notoriously unstable and easily disrupted subatomic particles, remain too unstable to perform such sophisticated operations for long.