Abstract
A century after the development of quantum mechanics, scientists have reached exciting times where they have not only come to terms with the weird laws governing our world, but start to build computational devices that make use of these quantum effects. Quantum random number generators and quantum communication systems are already commercially available. Work on quantum computers is accelerating, and computational capabilities beyond that of any imaginable classical computer seem just over the horizon. In this lecture, the speaker will discuss the origin of the exceptional computational power of quantum computers and how they may be used to solve important scientific, economic and societal problems that are impossible for classical computers.
About the speaker
Prof Matthias Troyer received his PhD in 1994 from ETH Zurich. He later spent 3 years at the University of Tokyo as a fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Sciences at the Institute for Solid State Physics. In 1998, he returned to ETH Zurich, where he eventually became a Professor of Computational Physics at the Institute for Theoretical Physics. Prof Troyer is currently on leave of absence from his position in ETH Zurich and become the Principal Researcher in the Quantum Architectures and Computation Group at Microsoft Research.
Prof Troyer’s research interests span a wide range of topics in computational science, including high performance computing, simulation of materials, quantum gases and quantum devices and recently also the modelling of island ecosystems. Frustrated by limitations of classical supercomputers, he has recently joined Microsoft to work on developing quantum computers.
Prof Troyer was elected a Trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics (2014) and Fellow of the American Physical Society (1994). He was also awarded the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics by the American Physical Society (2016).
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