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EU-US Workshop: Speakers’ Biographies

US Speakers

Charles H. Bennett

International Business Machines (IBM)

Charles H. Bennett was born in 1943, the son of music teachers Anne Wolfe Bennett and Boyd Bennett. He graduated from Croton-Harmon High School in 1960 and from Brandeis University, majoring in chemistry, in 1964. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1970 for molecular dynamics studies (computer simulation of molecular motion) under David Turnbull and Berni Alder. For the next two years he continued this research under the late Aneesur Rahman atArgonne Laboratory.

Since coming to IBM Research in 1972, he has worked on various aspects of the relation between physics and information. In 1973, building on the work of IBM's Rolf Landauer, he showed that general-purpose computation can be performed by a logically and thermodynamically reversible apparatus, which can operate with arbitrarily little energy dissipation per step because it avoids throwing away information about past logical states; and in 1982 he proposed a reinterpretation of Maxwell's demon, attributing its inability to break the second law to the thermodynamic cost of destroying, rather than acquiring, information. In collaboration with Gilles Brassard of the University of Montreal he developed a practical system of quantum cryptography, allowing secure communication between parties who share no secret information initially, based on the uncertainty principle instead of usual computational assumptions such as the difficulty of factoring, and with the help of John Smolin built a working demonstration of it in 1989.

Other research interests include algorithmic information theory, in which the concepts of information and randomness are developed in terms of the input/output relation of universal computers, and the analogous use of universal computers to define the intrinsic complexity or "logical depth" of a physical state as the time required by a universal computer to simulate the evolution of the state from a random initial state. In 1983-5 as visiting professor of computer science at Boston University, he taught courses on cryptography and the physics of computation.

In 1993 Bennett and Brassard, in collaboration with Claude Crepeau, Richard Jozsa, Asher Peres, and William Wootters, discovered "quantum teleportation," an effect in which the complete information in an unknown quantum state is decomposed into purely classical information and purely non-classical Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) correlations, sent through two separate channels, and later reassembled in a new location to produce an exact replica of the original quantum state that was destroyed in the sending process. In 1995-7, working with Smolin, Wootters, IBM's David DiVincenzo, and other collaborators, he helped found the quantitative theory of entanglement and introduced several techniques for faithful transmission of classical and quantum information through noisy channels, part of the larger and recently very active field of quantum information and computation theory. Recently he has worked on the capacities for quantum channels and interactions to simulate one another and the tradeoffs among communications resources.

He is an IBM Fellow, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is married with three grown children. His wife, Theodora M. Bennett, recently retired from directing a housing mobility program in Yonkers. His main hobbies are photography and music.

Carlton M. Caves

University of New Mexico

Carlton M. Caves is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico. He received the Ph.D. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1979. He worked at Caltech as a postdoctoral Research Fellow through 1981 and as a Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Physics from 1982 through 1987. From 1988 till 1992 he was Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics at the University of Southern California, moving to his present position at UNM in 1992. He was awarded the 1990 Einstein Prize of the Society for Optical and Quantum Electronics for his work on nonclassical light and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is the author of over 100 scientific papers on topics in gravitation theory, quantum optics, nonlinear dynamics, and quantum information science. His present research is concentrated on quantum measurement theory, quantum information theory, and classical and quantum chaos. Caves's complete curriculum vitae can be consulted at http://info.phys.unm.edu/~caves.

Steven Girvin

Yale University

Steven Girvin is a condensed matter theorist with interests in quantum phase transitions, quantum optics and quantum computation. Girvin received his BS from Bates College in 1971 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1977. From 1977 to 1979 he was a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University and Chalmers University of Technology. From 1979 to 1987 he was a staff physicist at NIST, and from 1987 to 2001 he was Professor of Physics at Indiana University. In 2001 Girvin moved to Yale University where he is now Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, and Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Physics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Girvin has made seminal contributions to the theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect and the theory of the superconductor-insulator quantum phase transition. His present interests are in quantum computation and quantum optics. In close collaboration with his experimental colleagues Robert Schoelkopf and Michel Devoret, he is currently pursuing development of a new paradigm of quantum optics and cavity QED for superconducting electrical circuits in the microwave regime.

Dietrich Leibfried

National Institute of Standards and Technology - Boulder (NIST)

Dietrich Leibfried has been working in the field of quantum information since his post-doctoral time in David Wineland’s group at NIST in 1995. From 1998 to 2001 he collaborated with Rainer Blatt in the other leading group pursuing quantum information processing with trapped ions, holding an assistant professor position at the University of Innsbruck. In spring 2001 he joined NIST on a permanent basis as co-leader of the group working on quantum information with trapped ions there.

Born 1965 in Stuttgart, Germany, Leibfried was interested in many things other than physics during high school, but decided that physics could be a solid foundation for becoming an airplane designer when he started college in 1985 at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. The foundation proved to be so interesting that he soon decided to dig deeper instead of flying high. He received his diploma (1991) and doctors degree (1995) in physics while working on precision laser spectroscopy of hydrogen with Theodor W. Hänsch at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. Ted Hänsch won the 2005 Nobel-prize for his contributions to laser based precision spectroscopy.

The start of Leibfried’s post-doctoral time in David Wineland’s group of at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was almost coincident with Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller’s proposal for quantum computation based on trapped ions (1996). Consequently he was working on some of the first experiments demonstrating the control over quantum states in trapped ions to back up Cirac and Zoller’s ideas. The NIST group also came up with several key ideas on how quantum computers based on trapped ions could be advanced to a large scale. After that, he joined Rainer Blatt’s team at the University of Innsbruck in 1998. Starting from an empty lab in 1996, Blatt’s team has now established itself as the second leading group in quantum computing with trapped ions.

In 2001 Leibfried returned to NIST to take the position of co-leader (together with David Wineland) of the group working on quantum information with trapped ions. Since then, the group has demonstrated a new technique for quantum gates that is slightly different from Cirac and Zoller’s approach. Based on this gate technique and the ideas for scale-up originating in 1997 the NIST group was able to demonstrate several milestones towards larger scale and robust quantum computing such as quantum teleportation, quantum error correction, a three-qubit quantum-Fourier transform and entangled states of up to six qubits.

Leibfried's honors include the 1993 Helmholtz-prize of the German national institute for physics

(PTB), the 2000 START-prize for young researchers of the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) and the 2004 Rudolf-Kaiser prize of the Stifterverband der Wissenschaften in Germany. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles.

Seth Lloyd

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Seth Lloyd is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He is also adjunct assistant professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He works on problems having to do with information and complex systems from the very small—how do atoms process information, how can you make them compute, to the very large — how does society process information? And how can we understand society in terms of its ability to process information?

His seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications — including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon's noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction — has gained him a reputation as an innovator and leader in the field of quantum computing. Lloyd has been featured widely in the mainstream media including the front page of The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Wired, The Dallas Morning News, and The Times (London), among others. His name also frequently appears (both as writer and subject) in the pages of Nature, New Scientist, Science and Scientific American.

Charles M. Marcus

Harvard University

Charles M. Marcus is Professor of Physics and Scientific Director of the Center for Nanoscale Systems at Harvard University. He received a B.S. in Physics from Stanford University in 1984, and an A.M. and Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University in 1987 and 1990, respectively. Professor Marcus served as Assistant Professor in Stanford's Department of Physics from 1992 to 1999 and as Associate Professor in 1999. He became a Professor of Physics at Harvard University in 2000.

He has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the N.S.F. Presidential Fellow (1997); ASSU teaching Award, Stanford University (1996); A.R.O. Young Investigator Award (1995); A.P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1994); N.S.F. Young Investigator Award (1994); O.N.R., National Academy of Sciences “Frontiers of Science” (1995); Terman Fellowship, Stanford University (1994); IBM Postdoctoral Fellowship (1990); AT&T Bell Laboratories PhD Scholarship (1985); Rebecca L. Carrington Memorial Award, Stanford University (1984); and the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Scholarship (1981).

Professor Marcus is a member of the advisory board of the Massachusetts Nanotechnology Initiative; the Theory Institute, Argonne National Laboratory; and Wonderfest, A Festival of Science. He is also series editor of Mesoscopic Physics; director of the Workshop on Mesoscopic Physics and Electron Interactions (2001); the Workshop on Quantum Systems Out of Equilibrium (2004); and the Extended Workshop on Mesoscopic Physics (1998); and the organizer of the National Academy of Sciences “Frontiers of Science” (1995).

Trey Porto

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Dr. Trey Porto has been a researcher in the Laser Cooling and Trapping group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) since 2000. His current interests are ultra-cold atoms in optical lattices, and their use in simulating many-body physics and as architectures for realizing quantum information processing. Dr. Porto’s background includes both atomic and condensed matter physics. Prior to joining the Laser Cooling and Trapping group, he studied the atomic physics of highly charged ions at the NIST electron beam ion trap, from 1998-2000. From 1996 to 1998 he worked as a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Dave Pritchard, using single-ion mass spectrometry to make the most accurate relative mass measurements in the world. He received his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1996, where he studied superfluid 3He in aerogel.

Irfan Siddiqi

University of California - Berkeley

Irfan Siddiqi is an experimental condensed matter physicist whose research focuses on the quantum mechanical properties of nanoscale electrical circuits at microwave frequencies and cryogenic temperatures. He is a faculty member at UC Berkeley, and is currently on leave at Yale University. Dr. Siddiqi received his PhD from Yale University and his A.B. degree from Harvard. Currently, he is investigating superconducting qubits and developing novel superconducting amplifiers which operate near the quantum limit of sensitivity.

EU Speakers
Atac Imamoglu
ETH Zurich

Atac Imamoglu has been full Professor of Quantum Electronics at the Department of Physics of the ETH Zurich since December 2002, where he is heading the research group on Quantum Photonics.

Prof. Imamoglu received his Ph.D from Stanford University with a dissertation on electromagnetically induced transparency and lasers without inversion. After postdoctoral stays at NTT Basic Research Laboratories in Tokyo, Japan and at the Institute of Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he joined The University of California at Santa Barbara as an Assistant Professor in 1993. He was promoted to Associate Professorship in 1997 and to full Professorship in 1999. Prof. Imamoglu has pioneered the use of quantum dots in study of quantum optical phenomena. In particular, his group demonstrated the first quantum dot single photon source, the Purcell effect, and the use of photon correlation spectroscopy to understand quantum dot physics.

Prof. Imamoglu has received the Wolfgang Paul Award of the Humboldt Foundation in 2002, David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in 1996, and NSF Career Award in 1995. He is a fellow of the Amrican Physical Society and of the Optical Society of America.

Jonathon Finley
Technical University of Munich

http://www.wsi.tum.de/Research/FinleygroupE24/tabid/143/Default.aspx

Rainer Blatt
University of Innsbruck

Education:
1959-1963  Primary school
1963-1971  High school
1971-1973  Military service in Germany
1973-1979  Studies of physics at Univ.of Mainz, Diploma thesis: "Storage of mass separated Barium isotopes", Diploma degree 1979.
1979-1981  Dissertation in physics at Univ. of Mainz, PhD thesis: "Precision determination of the ground state hyperfine splitting of ¹³⁷Ba⁺", doctoral degree 1981.

Academic education and positions held:
1981-1982  Univ. of Mainz (Prof. G. Werth), Research Associate
1982-1983  Joint Institute of Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA), Boulder, Co, USA, Research fellowship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
1983-1984  Freie Universität Berlin (Prof. E. Matthias), Research Associate
1984-1987  University of Hamburg (Prof. P. Toschek), Research Associate
1988          Habilitation thesis
1989-1994  University of Hamburg, Heisenberg fellow
1991-1994  JILA, Boulder, Co., USA, several research visits
1994-1995  University of Göttingen, Professor of Physics at the 3. Physikalisches Institut since 1995 University of Innsbruck, Full Professor of Physics, currently Institute Director and member of the academic senate since 2003 Director of the newly founded Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences

Awards: 1989 Heisenberg fellowship award of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and 1997 Innovations-Preis of the Tiroler Sparkasse for new ideas concerning quantum information processing.

Project support through Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung FWF (Spezialforschungsbereich SFB F015), European Union (TMR, IHP, IST), ARO, Austrian Industry (Institut für Quanteninformation GmbH), special funds of the Austrian ministry of science (BMBWK).

Memberships: Austrian Physical Society (ÖPG), German Physical Society (DPG), European Physical Society (EPS) (board member of the Quantum and Electro-Optics Division QEOD of EPS), American Physical Society (APS Fellow), Institute of Physics (IOP Fellow),
corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Science (ÖAW).

Editorial Work (current): Associate Editor of Quantum Information & Computation, Editorial board member of Quantum Information Processing, andEditorial board member of Applied Physics B (Lasers and Optics).

Daniel Loss
University of Basel

Daniel Loss received a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at the University of Zurich in 1985 under the supervision of Prof. A. Thellung. He stayed there as postdoctoral researcher for four more years before moving to the US in 1989. From 1989 to 1991 he worked as postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. A. J. Leggett, Urbana, and from 1991 to 1993 at IBM Research Center, NY (USA). In 1993 he moved to Vancouver (Canada) to become Assistant and then Associate Professor of Physics at Simon Fraser University. In 1996 he returned to Switzerland to become full Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Basel. Loss is director of the Basel Center for Quantum Computing and Quantum Coherence (QC2), and co-director (2006) of the Swiss National Center of Competence and Research (NCCR) in Nanoscale Science at the University of Basel. He received several prestigious fellowships, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and has been awarded the Humboldt Research Prize in 2005. He is married and has two sons.

Loss's research interests include many aspects of the theory of condensed matter systems with a particular focus on spin-dependent and phase-coherent phenomena (‘mesoscopics’) in semiconducting nanostructures and molecular magnets. A major portion of Loss's current research involves the theory of spin dynamics, spin coherence, spintronics in two-dimensional electron gases, and spin-related phenomena in semiconducting quantum dots--artificial atoms and molecules. Part of this work is related to quantum information processing (QIP)—quantum computing and quantum communication in solid state systems with focus on spin qubits, where Loss and collaborators made seminal contributions. Their theoretical predictions and proposals have stimulated many further investigations, and in particular many experimental programs on spin qubits worldwide. Current research includes spin relaxation and decoherence in quantum dots due to spin-orbit and hyperfine interaction; non-Markovian spin dynamics in bosonic and nuclear spin environments; generation and characterization of non-local entanglement with quantum dots, superconductors, Luttinger liquids or Coulomb scattering in interacting 2DEGs; spin currents in magnetic insulators and in semiconductors; spin Hall effect in disordered systems; spin orbit effects in transport and noise; asymmetric quantum shot noise in quantum dots; entanglement transfer from electron spins to photons; QIP with spin qubits in quantum dots and molecular magnets; macroscopic quantum phenomena (spin tunneling and coherence) in molecular and nanoscale magnetism.

Sandu Popescu
University of Bristol

http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/people/popescu_s/index.html

Gerhard Rempe
Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics

http://www.mpq.mpg.de/cms/mpq/en/departments/quanten/homepage_cms/members/G_Rempe/index.php

Anton Zeilinger
University of Vienna

Anton Zeilinger, born 1945 in Austria, has held positions at the University of Innsbruck, the Technical University of Munich, the Technical University of Vienna and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and distinguished visiting positions at Humboldt University in Berlin, Merton College of Oxford University and the Collège de France in Paris. Zeilinger received many awards for his scientific work, among the most recent being the King Faisal Prize (2005), and the first Newton Prize of the IOP (2007). He is a member of six Scientific Academies. Anton Zeilinger is currently Professor of Physics at the University of Vienna and Scientific Director of the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Since 2006, Zeilinger is the vice chairman of the board of trustees of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, an ambitious project initiated by Zeilinger's proposal. He is a fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams, going so far as to name his sailboat 42. In 2005 Anton Zeilinger was among the "10 people who could change the world", elected by the British newspaper New Statesman. In 2010 he received the Wolf Prize in Physics.

Education:
Ph.D., Universität Wien, thesis on "Neutron Depolarization in Dysprosium Single Crystals" under Prof. H. Rauch (1971); and Habilitation in Neutron and Solid State Physics, Techn. Univ. Wien (1979).

Appointments and Professional Activities:
‘Universitätsassistent', Atominstitut Wien, under Prof. H. Rauch (1972-1981); Guest Researcher (part-time), Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France (1974-1989); Fulbright Fellow in the U.S.A., Research Associate at M.I.T. in the Neutron Diffraction Laboratory under Prof. C.G. Shull (Nobel Laureate 1994) (1977-1978); Associate Professor of Physics, M.I.T. (1981-1983); 'Außerordentlicher Universitätsprofessor', Technische Universität Wien (1983-1990); Visiting Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia (1984); Adjunct Full Professor, part-time, Hampshire College, Amherst, U.S.A. (1986-1989); 'Universitätsprofessor' (C4, sabbatical), Techn. Univ. München (1988-1989); 'Ordentlicher Universitätsprofessor' (Full Professor) of Experimental Physics, Universität Innsbruck (1990-1999); Visiting Professor, Collège de France, Paris (1995);President, Austrian Physical Society (1996-1998); Visiting Research Fellow, Merton College, Oxford University (1998); "Ordentlicher Universitätsprofessor" of Experimental Physics, University of Vienna (1999-present); and co-director, Institute of quantum optics and quantum information, IQOQI, Austrian Academy of Sciences (2004- present).

Prizes and Awards:
1970s: Prize of the City of Vienna for the Encouragement of Young Scientists (75) and Prize for Junior Scientists, Kardinal Innitzer Foundation, Vienna (79)
1980s: Prize of the Theodor Körner Foundation, Vienna (80) and Sir Thomas Lyle Fellow, University of Melbourne (84).
1990s: Corresponding Member, Austrian Academy of Sciences (94), Prix "Vinci d' Excellence", Fondation LVHM, Paris (95), Kardinal Innitzer Würdigungspreis, Vienna (96), Austrian Scientist of the Year (96), European Lecturer, European Physical Society (96). Welsh Lecturer, University of Toronto (97), European Optics Prize, European Optical Society (97), Honorary Professor, University of Science and Technology of China (98), Full Member, Austrian Academy of Sciences (98), Fellow, American Physical Society (99)
2000s: Member, Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea (00), Senior Humboldt Fellow Prize, Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (00), Science Prize of the City of Vienna (00), Ehrenzeichen for the Sciences and Arts of the Republic of Austria (01), Member, Order "Orden pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste" (01), Prize "Visionär 2001", ORF and "Der Standard" Austria (01), "World Future Award 2001", Men´s World Day (01), "Erwin Wenzl Preis 2001", Upper Austria (01), Chemerda Lecturer, Pennsylvania State University (02), Member, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (02), Johannes Kepler-Prize, Upper Austria Sartorius Prize (03), Academy of Sciences Göttingen (02), Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award, AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers) (04), Lorenz-Oken-Medaille, Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte (04).

Peter Zoller
University of Innsbruck

Peter Zoller was born in Austria and attended high school and college at the Gymnasium Innsbruck, graduating in 1970. He earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Innsbruck in 1977. He has taught and done research there ever since, with the exception of 1990-1994, when he was at JILA in Colorado. He has also held guest professorships and lecturer positions at such diverse institutions as the University of Leiden, Harvard, and Tsinghua University in Beijing. From the beginning of his career, Zoller has been involved with the quantum effects of light interacting with matter. He focused on quantum optics and laser cooling. Zoller's research also includes using cold atoms to create a "quantum simulator" that could be used to study unexplained quantum phenomena such as those in high temperature superconductors.

Prof. Zoller has been presented with numerous scientific prizes and awards. Among those are the Max Born Award 1998 (Optical Society of America), the Wittgenstein Award 1998 (Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Austrian Science Foundation), the Niels Bohr/UNESCO Gold Medal 2005, the Max Planck Medal 2005 (German Physical Society), the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Triest in 2006, the “BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences 2008”, the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (USA) in 2009, and the Blaise-Pascal-Medal in Physics of the European Academy in Sciences in 2011.

Professor Zoller is a member of several scientific organizations and academies such as the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the “Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina”. Furthermore he has been elected as a Foreign Associate of the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences and of the US National Academy of Sciences, and as a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.