Luigi Frunzio

Timeline

1. 1990–1998

   Superconducting detectors in Italy

   Born in Napoli, Italy, Frunzio earns a Doctor in Physics degree at the University Federico II of Naples in 1990, with a dissertation on Josephson tunnel junctions. Contract research follows at the Italian National Research Council from 1991 to 1996 and at the Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte from 1997 to 1998, developing superconducting niobium-based tunnel-junction detectors.

2. 1999–2006

   Yale postdoc and Paris PhD

   A postdoctoral associateship with Dan Prober at Yale runs from 1999 to 2002, developing superconducting tunnel-junction X-ray and UV/optical imaging spectrometers. From 2001 to 2012, Frunzio is a staff researcher at the Institute of Cybernetics of the Italian National Research Council in Pozzuoli, Naples. Frunzio earns a PhD in physics at University Paris-Sud in 2006, advised by Marc Gabay and Michel Devoret, with a dissertation on superconducting circuits for amplification and processing of quantum signals.

3. 2003–2004

   Circuit QED at Yale

   From 2003, Frunzio collaborates with Michel Devoret, Dan Prober and Rob Schoelkopf in Yale's Department of Applied Physics on superconducting circuits for quantum computation. Yale's quantum computing effort publishes its first two studies in 2004, among them the Nature paper "Strong coupling of a single photon to a superconducting qubit using circuit quantum electrodynamics".

4. 2015–2019

   Co-founding Quantum Circuits

   Rob Schoelkopf, Michel Devoret and Frunzio co-found the Yale startup Quantum Circuits Inc. in 2015. In 2019, the company opens a 6,000-square-foot lab and manufacturing facility in New Haven.

5. 2016

   Error correction at break-even

   A 2016 Nature paper by Nissim Ofek, Andrei Petrenko and colleagues, with Frunzio as a coauthor, demonstrates a quantum error correction system that reaches the break-even point, encoding a qubit in Schrödinger-cat states of a superconducting resonator. The Yale team creates the first error correction system to preserve a qubit longer than the lifetime of its constituent parts.

6. March 2023

   Reinforcement learning in error correction

   In March 2023, an invited talk at the APS March Meeting presents "Real-time quantum error correction beyond break-even", with Volodymyr Sivak presenting and Frunzio among the authors. The work demonstrates a fully stabilized and error-corrected logical qubit whose coherence is significantly longer than that of all the imperfect quantum components involved, and it combines superconducting-circuit fabrication with model-free reinforcement learning.

7. 2026

   Quantum Circuits sold to D-Wave

   Quantum Circuits Inc. is sold to D-Wave for $550 million in 2026, with plans to more than double its New Haven workforce.

8. As of October 2026

   Senior research scientist at Yale

   Frunzio is a senior research scientist in applied physics at Yale Engineering, working with Michel Devoret and Rob Schoelkopf on experiments with superconducting qubits. The specialty is the fabrication and characterization of superconducting quantum circuits for quantum information processing and fault-tolerant quantum-error-corrected computation.