There are not too many start-ups we know of in the quantum space (if any) with a Nobel prize winner on the founding team. PASQAL is one of those, and as the celebrations took off for co-founder -Alain Aspect, the team at PASQAL can also be immensely proud of their innovations over the past few years.
PASQAL, a leader in quantum computing, has congratulated its co-founder – Alain Aspect, the Noble Prize in Physics 2022 winner, on his exceptional contributions to quantum physics research. Professor Alain Aspect is a professor at Université Paris-Saclay and École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France.
“Congratulations to all Nobel Prize winners, and especially I would like to congratulate and thank Alain Aspect. I am immensely delighted for him! Beyond his discoveries and his vast contribution to Quantum Physics, he also inspired, and will continue to inspire, young physicists, as he has been for me. We are deeply honored to have him in PASQAL, as a co-founder,”
Georges-Olivier Reymond, CEO of PASQAL.
After entering Collège de France, Professor Alain Aspect began working with cold atoms, another area of expertise. There he came up with a new way to cool down atoms so that he could use lasers to immobilize and control them. He established his research team at the Orsay Institut d’Optique in 1992 and started a global competition to produce a Bose-Einstein condensate, a brand-new state of matter.
In partnership with Georges-Olivier Reymond, Professor Philippe Grangier, one of his students, continued Alain’s inventive spirit by inventing and perfecting the optical tweezers for single atoms. In 2019, Professor Alain Aspect co-founded PASQAL with Georges-Olivier Reymond, Antoine Browaeys, Thierry Lahaye, and Christophe Jurczak,
“Almost forty years ago, I performed experiments showing that entanglement is a reality in spite of Einstein’s doubts. It belonged to the conceptual step of the second quantum revolution. In the recent years, I have been delighted to learn of ideas to use entanglement for solving some problems exponentially faster than with classical computers. This is the so-called Quantum Advantage. With PASQAL, I am glad to be in the game of the technological stage of the second quantum revolution, as I was a player in its conceptual stage,”
Alain Aspect, co-Founder PASQAL.
Entanglement is the situation in which two particles are created so that their quantum states remain unpredictable until one of them is measured. This phenomenon occurs even when the particles are far apart from one another. This concept is vital to the second quantum revolution.
Dr Alain Aspect’s research on entangled photons was a foundation for the most recent advances in quantum physics and the creation of quantum computers. His expertise will be crucial to PASQAL’s ability to accomplish its goals and usher companies into the quantum era by harnessing the potential of neutral atom quantum computing.
PASQAL is the first quantum computing company with a Nobel Prize-winning co-founder. The Nobel Prize is awarded to the discoveries that have most benefitted humanity; in this case, it heralds a new phase in quantum computing.
