Visiting Researcher - Prof. Olivier Pfister
Olivier Pfister, Professor of Physics at University of Virginia, completed a productive month stay as a visiting scientist at the INPHYNI institute.
Dates of visit: 4th to 26th of June 2025
Prof. Olivier Pfister from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA (USA) invited to the Nice Institute of Physics at Université Côte d'Azur for a month of collaborative work on quantum information exploiting quantum states of light.
Visiting Researcher Program
Professor Pfister collaborates with the INPHYNI group of Quantum Photonics and Information (PIQ group) on quantum information processing with quantum states of light.
Virginia D'Auria, full Professor at INPHYNI and Director of QuantAzur institute, reflects on the discussions and the spirit of collaboration fostered during this visit:
Quantum information processing is a highly competitive field, attracting major funding worldwide, due to its potential applications in both quantum communication and quantum computing. In particular, we investigate schemes that exploit quantum frequency combs — that is, multiple optical beams emitted each at a different color and exhibiting quantum correlations with one another. These states can be used to implement quantum graph states, where the different beams represent the vertices of a graph and their quantum correlations define the edges. This approach is especially promising for scalable, light-based quantum computing architectures.
Professor Olivier Pfister is a pioneer in the field of experimental and theoretical multimode quantum optics. His work has been particularly influential in the area of quantum computing with light, with special attention to measurement-based approaches and to continuous-variable quantum computing. He pioneered the use of the quantum optical frequency combs for quantum computing, for which Pfister was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013. He has demonstrated the CV entanglement of a record 60 qumodes into a cluster state and established that Gaussian cluster states and non-Gaussian photon-number-resolving (PNR) detection form a complete set of resources to implement fault tolerant universal quantum computing. The Pfister group has also validated the use of machine learning for the deterministic generation of non-Gaussian resources for universal quantum computing.
The collaboration between Professor Pfister and the PIQ group has already proven to be extremely fruitful. Together, we have submitted a joint project, and we have published several scientific papers on integrate photonic resources for quantum computing. The opportunity to invite him here has not only strengthened this existing collaboration, but has also opened up new avenues for common research in quantum information based on quantum states of light. During his visit, Professor Pfister also gave a 4.5-hour minicourse on quantum computing and algorithms with light. This course, attended by about fifteen researchers, both young and more experienced, was an inspiring and enriching experience for our community, and it stimulated many new discussions and ideas for the future.
Prof. Olivier Pfister’s visit was funded by the RISE Academy.