Exploring Quantum Frontiers: An Interview with Loic Henriet, Co-CEO at Pasqal

The countdown to Quantum.Tech is now on and ahead of the conference in Washington D.C., we have discussed with Pasqal’s Co-CEO, Loic Henriet. He has offered insights into the quantum landscape at large, and Pasqal’s role within it. Drawing on the exciting work Pasqal is doing in the neutral-atoms technology, Loic shares his perspectives on the advancements anticipated for 2024 from enterprise adoption to progress in quantum error correction.

Please give us a little introduction on your current role and what you do.

I am the former CTO and now co-CEO at PASQAL. At PASQAL, we have around 250 employees working on the technology of neutral atoms, where we design, build, and manufacture quantum processing units made of neutral atoms controlled by laser light. We embrace a full-stack approach, so we focus on not only the hardware but also low-level software and the application layer. That means we develop all quantum products, from the qubits to the applications. I have been in charge of the full-stack technology and the product roadmaps at PASQAL for a couple of years now.

What are you most excited about for quantum in 2024? What predictions do you have for the year ahead?

At PASQAL, 2024 will be a crucial year as it will correspond to the first delivery of two quantum devices installed on-premises as part of HPC (High Performance Computing) centers in France and Germany. We have worked extensively over the past few years to engineer our quantum processing units and make them industry-grade reliable. Now, we are happy to deliver those devices that will work within standard HPC environments early this year, and these devices will be available to the European research community. This step will lead to a wide variety of near-term applications on our devices. We also anticipate a lot of run time available for our quantum processors on the cloud this year compared to the previous year—a significant increase in the number of use cases and applications implemented on our hardware.

The other exciting aspect about 2024 will be the launch of acceleration on quantum computing road maps, especially regarding fault-tolerant aspects of quantum computing with neutral atoms. In this respect, we have seen great achievements in academia in 2023, and in 2024, start-up companies will also start accelerating.

Where does your organization sit within the quantum ecosystem?

In PASQAL, we are a full stack quantum company with activities ranging from the qubit itself to the application layer to the end user. We develop a broad scope of activities. And, of course, we have many collaborators at various instances of the quantum stack. We have collaborations and partnerships at the hardware level, the control level, and the algorithm level as well. Collaborations with the academic world are also fundamental for us, as we are working in a fast-evolving field, with many advances still occurring in research labs around the globe.

Where do you see breakthrough in quantum in 2024 with enterprises?

From my perspective, some customers will advance in quantum maturity in 2024 and will go closer to production. Whether they will be able to go to production in 2024 or 2025 is still an open question. But I am convinced we will see enterprises preparing for this phase, for the production phase. And this will be quite an important moment for the entire ecosystem.

Do you see any breakthroughs in error correction this year?

Definitely. 2022 and 2023 have been highly active years in this field. And we are witnessing an acceleration in error correction. It will remain at the proof-of-concept level in the short term. I am not expecting to see a useful quantum error-corrected device this year or the next but increases in performance when putting different ingredients together to build an error-corrected device.

Where do you stand on the future relationship between NISQ and foul tolerant quantum computing?

The general understanding of this relationship has evolved in the community, and now the frontier between NISQ and FTQC is less sharp than before. There is a whole continuum between current devices and ideal, errorless quantum computers. As our [error] mitigation [techniques] improve, partial fault tolerance is developed. I expect it will benefit current devices and increase their power, stability, and reliability. This is one of the most important results of all the research and development done on FTQC, impacting the functioning of real devices in the next five years.

How many qubits do you see us reaching in the next year to 18 months? Will they make a difference?

In the past year, we have seen several announcements reaching 1000 qubits in superconducting qubits and neutral atoms modalities. These numbers will continue to rise, especially in the context of neutral atom quantum processors. In the next year to 18 months, the quantum community might reach several 1000 qubits.

Now, we should not be concerned about the qubit numbers as the only performance metric. We need to have clean qubits and the operations we apply on those qubits need to be clean, reliable, and performed with high fidelity. Another additional key element is the repetition rate. It is quite important to increase this figure of merit, especially for neutral atoms, which have been slowly enhanced. However, there is much room for improvement on this performance axis. To summarize, we need to focus on the number of qubits, range of operations, quality of operations that you can apply on the device, and repetition rate.

How do you see quantum working with AI and machine learning?

In many cases, machine learning tools and quantum can be complementary, and working together might lead to some interesting new algorithms and applications. One example we have been developing at PASQAL concerns hybrid quantum-classical graph machine learning algorithms, where an entirely classical workflow is complemented using quantum for a particular routine at a specific moment in the computation workflow to enhance and diversify the algorithm. This is one example, and many others will be developed in the next few years.

Meet and hear from Pasqal at Quantum.Tech USA this April in Washington D.C.

As gold sponsors at Quantum.Tech USA, you can meet the Pasqal team in person this April as they showcase their latest developments and the exciting work being done to help progress quantum as an industry to the next level. Amy Golem, Senior Regional Sales Manager, North America, Pasqal will be joined alongside Michael Biercuk, CEO, Q-Ctrl, Yuval Boger, CMO, QuEra Computing, Milan Begliarbekov, Director of Quantum Foundary, Quantum Computing Inc discussing and exploring the key topic FROM NISQ TO FTQC – where do the major platform and processor providers now stand?

Don't miss out on hearing this fantastic panel on Thursday April 25 at 11:45am. Register your place here today to ensure you're not left disappointed.