People News

If the looming holiday lull leaves you yearning for news from the quantum world, JQI has you covered. Below we present an overivew of our major research and outreach activities from the past year, which marked JQI’s tenth anniversary.

For the third year running, JQI Fellow and Distinguished University Professor of Physics Sankar Das Sarma has been identified as a Highly Cited Researcher. The annual distinction, previously compiled by Thomson Reuters IP & Science and now assembled by Clarivate Analytics, honors scientists who publish extensively and whose citation counts rank in the top 1 percent in a given year and field.

From credit card numbers to bank account information, we transmit sensitive digital information over the internet every day. Since the 1990s, though, researchers have known that quantum computers threaten to disrupt the security of these transactions.

That’s because quantum physics predicts that these computers could do some calculations far faster than their conventional counterparts. This would let a quantum computer crack a common internet security system called public key cryptography.

A trio of researchers who laid the foundation for understanding numerous exotic phases of matter have split the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter" to three laureates: David Thouless of the University of Washington, Duncan Haldane of Princeton University and Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University.