"The Quantum Computer:
Miracle or Mirage?"

Michel H. Devoret, Professor of Applied Physics and of Physics at Yale Uninversity and formerly a director of research of the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) at Saclay, graduated from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris in 1975 and started graduate work in molecular quantum physics at the University of Orsay. He then joined Professor Anatole Abragam's laboratory in CEA-Saclay to work on NMR in solid hydrogen, and received his PhD from Paris University in 1982.

He spent two post-doctoral years working on macroscopic quantum tunneling with John Clarke's laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. He has pursued this research on quantum mechanical electronics upon his return to Saclay, starting his own research group with Daniel Esteve and Cristian Urbina.

The main achievements of the "quantronics group" are the measurement of the traversal time of tunneling, the invention of the single electron pump (now the basis of a new standard of capacitance), the first observation of the charge of Cooper pairs and the first measurement of the effect of atomic valence on the conductance of a single atom.

Michel Devoret has received the Ampère Prize of the French Academy of Science (together with Daniel Esteve) and the Descartes-Huygens Prize of the Royal Academy of Science of the Netherlands.