Zaki LEGHTAS - Superconducting circuits: from fundamental science to quantum technologies
Zaki LEGHTAS
LPENS, Mines Paris
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
1:30 pm - ConfIV - 24 rue Lhomond 75005 PARIS
Superconducting circuits: from fundamental science to quantum technologies
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis for showing that a superconducting electrical circuit - a macroscopic object made of wires and plates, with currents flowing and voltage drops - can behave quantum mechanically.
In this colloquium, I will revisit these foundational experiments and follow what grew out of them. Thanks to superconductivity that eliminates dissipation and the Josephson effect that introduces nonlinearity, these circuits have been turned into quantum bits (qubits). Their coherence times have improved by six orders of magnitude over twenty-five years, and tech giants such as Google and IBM manufacture chips with hundreds of superconducting qubits, planning to scale towards a universal quantum computer.
Finally, I will present the research of the QUANTIC team, where we design new qubits, both to improve quantum coherence and build ultra-sensitive detectors.