Charles Masamed Marcus (born October 8, 1962) is an American physicist and professor. Currently a professor at the University of Washington and the Niels Bohr Institute, he previously worked at both Stanford and Harvard universities. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018 for his contributions to condensed matter and mesoscopic physics. [1] He has also been recognized with the H. C. Ørsted Gold Medal for his contributions to quantum computing, spin qubits, and superconducting qubits. [2] [3]
Marcus was born on October 8, 1962, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, [4] and grew up in Sonoma, California. [5] He was the valedictorian of Sonoma Valley High School's class of 1980, [6] and attended Stanford University, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics. He later received Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in physics from Harvard University. [4] His doctoral thesis, published in 1990, is entitled Dynamics of Analog Neural Networks. [7]
In 1992, Marcus began working as an assistant professor at Stanford University. He was promoted to associate professor in 1999, but left the next year for a professor position at Harvard University. He worked there until 2012, when he moved to the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen to serve as Villum Kahn Rasmussen Professor. [4] He continues to hold his professorship in Copenhagen, but since 2023 has served as professor and Boeing Johnson Endowed Chair at the University of Washington. [5] Marcus stated that he was "excited to shepherd exchange between the UW and University of Copenhagen" as he continues to hold appointments at both institutions. [8]
Honors won by Marcus include fellowship in the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as election to the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. [5]
Aage Niels Bohr was a Danish nuclear physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 with Ben Roy Mottelson and James Rainwater "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection". His father was Niels Bohr.
The Copenhagen interpretation is a collection of views about the meaning of quantum mechanics, stemming from the work of Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and others. While "Copenhagen" refers to the Danish city, the use as an "interpretation" was apparently coined by Heisenberg during the 1950s to refer to ideas developed in the 1925–1927 period, glossing over his disagreements with Bohr. Consequently, there is no definitive historical statement of what the interpretation entails.
Felix Bloch was a Swiss-American physicist and Nobel physics laureate who worked mainly in the U.S. He and Edward Mills Purcell were awarded the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for "their development of new ways and methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements." In 1954–1955, he served for one year as the first director-general of CERN. Felix Bloch made fundamental theoretical contributions to the understanding of ferromagnetism and electron behavior in crystal lattices. He is also considered one of the developers of nuclear magnetic resonance.
Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.
The Niels Bohr Institute is a research institute of the University of Copenhagen. The research of the institute spans astronomy, geophysics, nanotechnology, particle physics, quantum mechanics, and biophysics.
An interpretation of quantum mechanics is an attempt to explain how the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics might correspond to experienced reality. Although quantum mechanics has held up to rigorous and extremely precise tests in an extraordinarily broad range of experiments, there exist a number of contending schools of thought over their interpretation. These views on interpretation differ on such fundamental questions as whether quantum mechanics is deterministic or stochastic, local or non-local, which elements of quantum mechanics can be considered real, and what the nature of measurement is, among other matters.
Ben Roy Mottelson was an American-Danish nuclear physicist. He won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the non-spherical geometry of atomic nuclei.
John Hasbrouck Van Vleck was an American physicist and mathematician. He was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977, for his contributions to the understanding of the behavior of electronic magnetism in solids.
Léon Nicolas Brillouin was a French physicist. He made contributions to quantum mechanics, radio wave propagation in the atmosphere, solid-state physics, and information theory.
Hendrik Anthony "Hans" Kramers was a Dutch physicist who worked with Niels Bohr to understand how electromagnetic waves interact with matter and made important contributions to quantum mechanics and statistical physics.
Gregory Breit was an American physicist born in Mykolaiv, Russian Empire. He was a professor at New York University (1929–1934), University of Wisconsin–Madison (1934–1947), Yale University (1947–1968), and University at Buffalo (1968–1973). In 1921, he was Paul Ehrenfest's assistant in Leiden University.
Anthony Zee is a Chinese-American physicist, writer, and a professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the physics department of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Eugene Feenberg was an American physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.
Edwin Crawford Kemble was an American physicist who made contributions to the theory of quantum mechanics and molecular structure and spectroscopy. During World War II, he was a consultant to the Navy on acoustic detection of submarines and to the Army on Operation Alsos.
David Mathias Dennison was an American physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics, spectroscopy, and the physics of molecular structure.
Eugen Merzbacher was an American physicist.
Helge Stjernholm Kragh is a Danish historian of science who focuses on the development of 19th century physics, chemistry, and astronomy. His published work includes biographies of Paul Dirac, Julius Thomsen and Ludvig Lorenz, and The Oxford Handbook of the History of Modern Cosmology (2019) which he co-edited with Malcolm Longair.
Klaus Mølmer is a Danish physicist who is currently a professor at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen. From 2000 to 2022, he was a professor of physics at the University of Aarhus.
Jan Faye is a Danish philosopher of science and metaphysics. He is currently associate professor in philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. Faye has contributed to a number of areas in philosophy including explanation, interpretation, philosophy of the humanities and the natural sciences, evolutionary naturalism, philosophy of Niels Bohr, and topics concerning time, causation, and backward causation (Retrocausality).
The current state of quantum computing is referred to as the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, characterized by quantum processors containing up to 1,000 qubits which are not advanced enough yet for fault-tolerance or large enough to achieve quantum advantage. These processors, which are sensitive to their environment (noisy) and prone to quantum decoherence, are not yet capable of continuous quantum error correction. This intermediate-scale is defined by the quantum volume, which is based on the moderate number of qubits and gate fidelity. The term NISQ was coined by John Preskill in 2018.