Aaron Trowbridge
Currently co-founder and CEO at Harmoniqs, a startup building Julia-based quantum optimal control and calibration software. Previously, a research associate in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. An avid reader, climber, runner, and Bialetti coffee drinker.
Sessions
The name means small, so we made it smaller. Piccolo.jl 1.0 consolidates five quantum optimal control packages into one -- one language, one package, just using Piccolo. A unified Julia codebase that AI coding agents can thrive in -- accelerating feature development, performance work, and letting users go from system parameters to optimized pulses naturally. We demonstrate real-world impact through robust control theory (arXiv:2602.10349) and experimental studies of universal dynamics in Rydberg arrays (arXiv:2508.19075).
Harmoniqs is a startup building quantum control infrastructure entirely in Julia. Our open-source stack, Piccolo.jl, and its private extension Piccolissimo.jl share one language from API to numerics. We discuss compiling and delivering Julia without exposing source code, deploying on HPC resources including GPU clusters, and how Julia's single-language design makes AI coding agents unusually effective for a small team. A case study in why Julia is ready for startups.