PhD proposal in energetic cost of fault-tolerant quantum computing
The MOCQUA team at the Loria laboratory in Nancy (France) is looking for a PhD student in quantum computing theory. More details about the offer and platform to apply is provided in the link
The goal will be to analyze how the energy consumption of fault-tolerant quantum computers scales as a function of the size of quantum algorithms, in a regime where the computation is specifically optimized to minimize energy consumption rather than qubits or gates counts. The main objective will be to determine whether better energy scaling than that predicted by the quantum threshold theorems [1,2] can be achieved, following the approaches developed in [3,4].
In practice, the PhD student will mostly focus on fault-tolerant quantum computing theory, and interact with other researchers providing the hardware energetic and noise models. Because such models can introduce correlated noise, this project will indirectly help understanding how to better design fault-tolerant circuits to resist such noise. To design more resource-efficient and noise-resilient fault-tolerant circuits, the PhD might use tools from diagrammatic reasoning for quantum circuits currently developed in the group [5], as well as recent developments in fault-tolerant circuit transformations [6].
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This project will be supervised by Marco Fellous-Asiani (Starting faculty at INRIA Université de Lorraine; expert in energetics of fault-tolerant quantum computing [3,4]), Simon Perdrix (Research director at INRIA Université de Lorraine; expert in diagrammatic reasoning for quantum circuits [5]), and involve close collaborations with Michael Vasmer (Starting Faculty at Inria Paris; expert in fault-tolerant quantum computing [7,8]).
References:
[1] Yamasaki, H. et al (2024). Nature Physics, 20(2), 247-253.
[2] Nguyen, Q. T. et al. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (pp. 730-737).
[3] 𝐅𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐬-𝐀𝐬𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐢, 𝐌. et al. PRX Quantum, 4(4), 040319.
[4] 𝐅𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐬-𝐀𝐬𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐢, 𝐌. et al PRX Quantum, 2(4), 040335.
[5] Clement, A., Delorme, N., 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐱 𝐒. In the proceedings of LICS 2024.
[6] Rodatz, B. et al Arxiv:2506.17181 2025.
[7] Bourassa, J. E., Alexander, R. N., 𝐕𝐚𝐬𝐦𝐞𝐫, 𝐌. et al Quantum, 5, 392.
[8] Huang, E., Pesah, A., Chubb, C. T., 𝐕𝐚𝐬𝐦𝐞𝐫, 𝐌. et al (2023). PRX Quantum, 4(3), 030338.