The 2025 CNRS Innovation Medal has been awarded to the physicist Pascale Senellart

Pascale Senellart: On the road to the quantum computer

The research conducted by Pascale Senellart, a CNRS Research Professor at the Centre for Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies (CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay), focuses on photons, the elementary quantum entities that make up light, as well as “quantum dots,” nanostructures that can generate them on demand. By controlling the emission of quantum dots, in 2013 her team created new sources that very efficiently emit single photons in a precise direction, thereby enabling their manipulation within photonic circuits. Her research and the resulting innovations have paved the way for using photons in quantum computing, one of the four pillars of quantum technology. Indeed, photons are excellent systems for encoding quantum bits–or qubits–the basic unit of information for quantum computers. To make their single-photon sources accessible to the scientific community, Senellart and her colleagues Niccolo Somaschi and Valérian Giesz founded the start-up Quandela in 2017. From 2020 onwards, Quandela moved in a new direction: building their own photonic quantum computers by jointly developing the hardware and software. In 2024, Quandela delivered Lucy–the most powerful photonic quantum computer housed in the CEA computing center.