Guest Post: What CERN Brings To Quantum

Guest Post by Dr. Kris Naudts, Zeynep Koruturk and Donald Harmitt @ Firgun Ventures.

Firgun Ventures is a VC firm investing in Series A/B quantum scale-ups globally.

CERN occupies a monumental position in European science and particle physics. The laboratory near Geneva operates the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful accelerator, and confirmed the Higgs boson, the particle linked to how other particles gain mass. It also gave the world the web in 1989, through the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee and his Belgian collaborator Robert Cailliau, creating a natural expectation that it should anchor Europe’s quantum ambitions.

The laboratory holds ground that rival quantum vendors and European policymakers alike treat as neutral, underwritten by a funding structure few national programmes can match. From that position it is drawing quantum sensing towards its detectors, quantum networks towards its timing systems, and quantum processors onto its benchmarks. The common thread is that CERN’s influence comes from testing other people’s quantum hardware and supplying the specialist engineering that hardware depends on.

CERN’s neutral ground is its most unique and most influential quantum asset