Michel Devoret is a French physicist and F. W. Beinecke Professor of Applied Physics at Yale University. He also holds an appointment as the Director of the Applied Physics Nanofabrication Lab at Yale. He is known for his pioneering work on the Josephson quantum electron pump as well as in groundbreaking contributions to initiating the fields of circuit quantum electrodynamics and quantronics.
Biography
Devoret was born in France. He graduated from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications in Paris and went on to earn his PhD in physics from the University of Orsay in 1982, while working in the molecular quantum physics group at Paris. After his doctoral work, he proceeded to post-doctoral training for two years, working on macroscopic quantum tunneling in John Clarke's laboratory at the University of California Berkeley. Devoret's research has been focused on experimental solid state physics and condensed matter physics, with specific emphasis on circuit quantum electrodynamics and a field he and his colleagues initiated, known as "quantronics," the study of certain mesoscopic electronic effects in which collective degrees of freedom, such as electric currents and voltages behave quantum mechanically. In addition, his group has been carrying out investigations on single Cooper pair devices for fields such as quantum computation and metrology, and studying amplification, information, and noise in mesoscopic systems. His work in association with well-known experimentalists in the field such as Rob Schoelkopf, Steven Girvin and Irfan Siddiqi has brought about valuable insights in quantum computing and in developing a new paradigm of circuit QED using superconducting electrical circuits. His recent work, in association with a colleague, A. Marblestone, has shown an exponential quantum enhancement in communication channels as a result of entanglement. In addition to a number of awards, he has been awarded the John Bell Prize in 2013 for "Fundamental and pioneering experimental advances in entangling superconducting qubits and microwave photons, and their application to quantum information processing."
