Kim Vallée

I'm a

Image par Solkoll — Travail personnel, Domaine public, wikimedia

About

I have started to be interested in quantum mechanics in the early days of my bachelor's degree, where I studied both physics and computer science. I continued in a master of physics, and after two internships in LIP6 and one in Atos I found out that I wanted to pursue in the foundations of quantum mechanics, contextuality being the perfect candidate. But my interests are not limited to science, I like to do the guitar on my free time and I have multiple programming projects at the same time.

PhD student in quantum foundations

I am now in my PhD since October 2022 in the Quantum Information team of LIP6, in Paris. Under the supervision of Damian Markham and Marco Túlio Quintino I am working on the foundations of quantum mechanics and on all aspects of contextuality, a weird feature that may define partly quantum mechanics.

  • Degree: Master (PhD in preparation)
  • Email: kim.vallee (at) lip6.fr
  • Lab: LIP6 - CNRS - Sorbonne Université

During my PhD I had the opportunity to teach for two consecutive years in bachelor's and master's degree level. I also developed an educational board game on quantum mechanics called Qats, which will soon be edited and hopefully popularized in france. I'm also the co-founder of SoQET, a student association for students in the field of quantum technologies.

Some numbers

Find below some useful, and some less informative numbers about me.

Publications Fetched from google scholar

Years as a researcher

Collaborators across papers

Blog posts on projects and research

Skills

Linguistic skills

  • English — bilingual
  • French — native
  • Japanese — notions
  • German — notions

Practical skills

  • Programming — Python, C, LaTeX, Julia
  • Mathematical optimization — Linear Programming, Semi-Definite Programming
  • Machine & deep learning — Theory, Applications
  • Office suite — Word, excel
  • Figma — Average usage

Resume

You can find in details my curriculum below, from high school to my current position, each part given with some explanatory text.

Summary

Kim Vallée

I'm a PhD student working in the field of quantum foundations, starting from both computer science and physics, I have evolved in a very diverse environment.

PhD in Quantum Foundations

10/2022 - Now

Location: Paris, France

3 years and 6 months PhD on quantum foundations, particularly focused on contextuality. Participation in conferences (see the tab on the right). For a more complete description, look at the employments, teachings and conferences tabs. More can be found about my interests in the research interest section and in the papers section.

Master of Physics

09/2020 - 07/2022

Location: Palaiseau, France

À la carte classes, comprising both physics (quantum theory, quantum information, lasers and masers, condensed matter theory) and computer science (deep learning, machine learning, mathematical optimization). For these two years I was awarded a scholarship of excellence. I also did an internship in condensed matter theory in the master years.

Physics & CS Bachelor (3rd year)

09/2019 - 05/2020

Location: Paris, France

Third year of Bachelor degree in double major Physics and Computer Science. Unique student of the studies, which were created for me. Highest honours on the degree.

Physics Bachelor (1st & 2nd year)

09/2017 - 05/2019

Location: Lille, France

Bachelor degree in Physics, with more than 50% of classes in English. This was done at the same time as my Bachelor degree in computer science. Highest honours & top 5 of the school year each year.

Computer Science Bachelor (1st & 2nd year)

09/2017 - 05/2019

Location: Lille, France

Bachelor degree in Computer Science, with more than 50% of classes in English. This was done at the same time as my Bachelor degree in Physics. Highest honours & top 1 of the school year each year.

PhD - Contextuality

October 2022 - Now

Contextuality, LP & SDP, noisy inequalities

My PhD is focused on contextuality, its definition, its potential usefulness, and potentially how to measure it with noise or imperfect experimental setup. More can be found in the publications part and in the curriculum part. During my PhD I am also teaching in programming (C mostly) and in Master 2 (Quantum information). Under the supervision of Damian Markham and Marco Túlio Quintino.

LIP6 - Contextuality

January - July 2022

Contextuality, frameworks, literature review

This 6 months internship served as a basis for my PhD, with an extensive introduction to contextuality and a long literature review, this allowed me to start my PhD with strong knowledge (yet incomplete) of contextuality. I skimmed through a lot of frameworks in order to get used to them. Under the supervision of Dr. Damian Markham.

ATOS - Quantum simulation

June - September 2021

Quantum simulation, condensed matter, myQLM

Study of condensed matter systems, quasi periodic potential, and computation of interesting quantities such as the superfluid fraction and the inverse participation ratio on a quantum computer, aiming at NISQ devices. Under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Ayral.

CPHT - Fractality condensed matter

September 2020 - Septembre 2021

Condensed matter, fractality, Aubry-André

This one year internship, which was focused on condensed matter, was made in parallel to my Master degree. I was focusing on the appearance of fractality in condensed matter systems, such as the Aubry-André model and its consequences on energy levels or material properties.

LIP6 - Photononics

June - August 2020

Optics, quantum computing

This internship unfortunately fell in the middle of the COVID pandemic, but I had the occasion to talk with LIP6 members and learn about photonic quantum computing. One the aim was to be able to implement better CNOT gates in a photonic circuit. Under the supervision of Dr. Frédéric Grosshans & Dr. Andrea Olivo.

Private teacher

September 2019 - April 2020

Teaching, computer science, physics

During my Bachelor's degree year I took some of my time to teach students ranging from computer science to physics, I helped a lot of students to get their diploma. It was also a nice experience to learn how to teach which helped me a lot with my current activities.

IEMN - Statistical Physics

June 2019 - July 2019

Statistical physics, Fortran, 1D chain

I discovered the field of statistical physics, using FORTRAN to make efficient simulations, in the aim of measuring the ballistic effect of temperature. It was only a discovery internship but it was nonetheless very interesting under the supervision or Dr. Pier Luca Palla.

Quantum Information

2022 - Now

6.0 h / year - Master 2

In this course I handled 3 tutorials on contextuality, writing the exercise sheets and corrections. It served as an introduction to Kochen Specker contextuality, under the Sheaf-Theoretic framework approach. I also made exercises on non-locality.

Programming elements 2

2022 - Now

38.5 h / year - Licence 1

The course focuses on teaching the basics of C to students. It is a good introduction to types and structures in C with two practical exams. I am a practical session teacher.

OOP introduction

2023 - Now

19.5 h / year - Licence 2

This course teaches the basics of Object-Oriented Programming in Java. The students had to learn about all the concepts around classes in Java. As a teacher I was helping in class and I prepared midterm exams on computer.

Data structure

2022 - 2023

17.5 h / year - Licence 2

This course in C is an advanced course for computer scientist where they have to do a mini-project in C. The year I was teaching students had to program a mini-git in C, where they could add, commit and checkout branches.

Solstice of foundations

June 20, 2022 - June 24, 2022

Summer school - In person - ETH, Zürich, Swizerland

Picturing Quantum Weirdness

July 2, 2023 - July 16, 2023

Summer school - Online - ICTQT, Gdansk, Poland

Online following of the summer school on ZX calculus and diagrammatic representation of quantum mechanics.

QPL

July 17, 2023 - July 21, 2023

Conference - In person - IHP, Paris, France

Poster presentation of my paper Corrected Bell and Noncontextuality Inequalities for Realistic Experiments .

FoQaCiA

April 29, 2024 - May 3, 2024

Conference - In person - Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada

Presented a gong show talk of 5min about the current status of my research.

Blog

Interested in my side projects ? This is the place to look. Ranging from board games to music, I will put in my blog my various ongoing activities and projects.

  • All
  • QATS (1)
Qats - Le jeu de mécanique quantique
QATS - LE JEU DE MÉCANIQUE QUANTIQUE

Research interests

As a researcher, I have many research interests, ranging from quantum foundations to education.

Sheaf Theoretic contextuality

The sheaf theoretic framework for contextuality was popularized in a seminal work of Abramsky and Brandenburger in 2011. I like all projects related to extending this theory, and to relate it to quantum theory.

Operational theory

This other framework for contextuality was developed by Spekkens in 2005. This different approach to contextuality is more operational and I believe that the interactions between this framework and the Sheaf theoretic framework can be explored more in depth.

Classical models and relaxations

Whether it is in the Sheaf Theoretic framework, in the operational framework or any other representation of classical physics, I like to relax the assumptions that come with these frameworks and see how these relaxations interact with quantum theory. This is particularly interesting to understand the "properties" that make quantum contextual.

Contextuality and computation

More and more, people are interested in applications of quantum mechanics to computational advantage. Quantum computation, in its various forms, has been a huge subject of interest, but we still don't know what really makes quantum advantage. It's been pointed out in recent works that it might be related to contextuality, and I think this path should be explored more in depth.

Reconstruction of quantum theory

I do believe that the actual formulation of quantum mechanics based on mathematics is not the right way to go. We should find physical principals that describe quantum mechanics, then applications would become natural. It's not an active subject of my research but rather an interest I have.

Papers

Here is a collection of my papers, fetched from Google Scholar, with the abstract summary

Corrected Bell and non-contextuality inequalities for realistic experiments

K Vallée, PE Emeriau, B Bourdoncle, A Sohbi, S Mansfield, D Markham

Contextuality is a feature of quantum correlations. It is crucial from a foundational perspective as a non-classical phenomenon, and from an applied perspective as a resource for quantum advantage. It is commonly defined in terms of hidden variables, for which it forces a contradiction with the assumptions of parameter-independence and determinism. The former can be justified by the empirical property of non-signalling or non-disturbance, and the latter by the empirical property of measurement sharpness. However, in realistic experiments neither empirical property holds exactly, which leads to possible objections to contextuality as a form of non-classicality, and potential vulnerabilities for supposed quantum advantages. We introduce measures to quantify both properties, and introduce quantified relaxations of the corresponding assumptions. We prove the continuity of a known measure of contextuality, the contextual fraction, which ensures its robustness to noise. We then bound the extent to which these relaxations can account for contextuality, via corrections terms to the contextual fraction (or to any non-contextuality inequality), culminating in a notion of genuine contextuality, which is robust to experimental imperfections. We then show that our result is general enough to apply or relate to a variety of established results and experimental set-ups. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Quantum contextuality, causality and freedom of choice’.

Contact

If you want to contact me, don't hesitate to email me.

Location:

LIP6, 4 place Jussieu, 75005 Paris