Senior Author, University of Colorado Boulder
Appears in 2 stories
Senior Author, University of Colorado Boulder - Leading acousto-optic quantum control research
Quantum computers can already outperform classical supercomputers on specific tasks. Google's Willow chip solved a problem in five minutes that would take today's fastest machines 10 septillion years, and in October 2025 demonstrated the first verifiable quantum advantage with its Quantum Echoes algorithm—13,000 times faster than supercomputers. But scaling from today's 100-qubit systems to the million-qubit machines needed for real-world applications requires control hardware that doesn't exist yet. Current laser control systems are tabletop-sized, power-hungry, and impossible to replicate thousands of times over.
Updated Dec 28, 2025
Karl Gustafson Endowed Chair in Quantum Engineering, CU Boulder - Leading CMOS photonics research for quantum control systems
Quantum computers promise to revolutionize drug discovery, cryptography, and materials science—but only if they can scale from today's dozens of qubits to millions. The bottleneck isn't the qubits themselves. It's the massive control systems: each qubit needs laser beams precisely controlled by bulky modulators, and thousands of cables snaking from room temperature into refrigerators colder than deep space. A lab rack that controls 100 qubits would need an entire data center to control a million.
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