Pierre Desjardins (C12): Building qubits from carbon nanotubes instead of silicon

Key takeaways

  • C12 suspends carbon nanotubes over a substrate and uses their natural crystal purity to shield qubits from the material defects that plague silicon and superconducting devices.
  • The clean, defect free structure of carbon nanotubes is pitched as a built in advantage for longer coherence times rather than something engineered in after the fact.
  • Desjardins argues that instead of chasing one universal quantum chip, near term hardware should be designed around specific applications from the start.
  • Carbon nanotubes are presented as a distinct qubit platform alongside superconducting, trapped ion, and silicon spin approaches, each with different tradeoffs in noise and scalability.

Summary

Pierre Desjardins, co-founder and CEO of C12 Quantum Electronics, a company using carbon nanotubes to create a new quantum architecture, is interviewed by Yuval Boger. Pierre and Yuval talk about C12’s unique technology, what carbon nanotubes are, designing custom application-specific quantum chips, and much more.

Read the full transcript on the Quantum Computing Report