Chetan Nayak

Last updated
Chetan Nayak
ChetanNK.jpg
Born
New York City, NY, United States
Alma mater
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Quantum computing, Computer Science
Institutions Microsoft
Thesis Theories of the half-filled Landau level [3]  (1996)
Doctoral advisor Frank Wilczek [3]

Chetan Nayak (born 1971) is an Indian-American physicist and computer scientist specializing in quantum computing. He is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a technical fellow and distinguished engineer on the Microsoft Azure Quantum hardware team. [4] He joined Microsoft in 2005 and became director and general manager of Quantum Hardware at Microsoft Station Q at Microsoft Research in 2014. [5] [6] [7]

Contents

Education and career

Nayak was born in New York City in 1971. He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1992 and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1996. [5] [3] His dissertation on "Theories of the half-filled Landau level" was completed under Frank Wilczek. [3]

In 1996, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at University of California, Berkeley (UCSB) and a professor of physics at University of California, Los Angeles from 1997 to 2006. [5] [8] [9]

He joined Microsoft in 2005 as a visiting researcher in Redmond, Washington, and the faculty of UCSB in 2007 where he has served as technical fellow and professor of condensed matter theory through 2024. [5] [7] [10] [11]

Nayak has contributed to the theory of topological phases, high-temperature superconductivity, the quantum Hall effect, and phases of periodically driven quantum systems. [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [11] [17] [18]

Scientific work

In 1996, Nayak and Wilczek discovered the type of non-Abelian statistics in paired quantum Hall states associated with Majorana zero modes. [16]

In 2005, with Michael Freedman and Sankar Das Sarma, Nayak authored a proposal for a topological qubit using the 5/2 fractional quantum Hall state as the non-Abelian topological state. [14] [19] In 2006 and 2008, Das Sarma, Freedman and Nayak developed theoretical proposals for topological quantum computing based on non-abelian anyons. [17] [11]

In 2011, Nayak, Parsa Bonderson and Victor Gurarie proved that quasiparticles in certain quantized Hall states are non-Abelian anyons, firmly establishing the mathematical foundation of these particles. [12]

In 2016, with Dominic Else and Bela Bauer, he developed Floquet time crystals and predicted its occurrence in periodically driven systems. [15] [18]

Nayak also led research teams in inducing a phase of matter characterized by Majorana zero modes with low enough disorder to pass the topological gap protocol, demonstrating the viability of topological quantum computing. [20]

In February 2025, the Microsoft Quantum team announced the creation of a chip powered by a topological architecture. [21] The claim has been met with skepticism by many in the quantum scientific and engineering community, who question the lack of data supporting the existence of the proposed qubits. [22] [23] Nayak has clarified that the supporting data, namely measurements on the native operations in a measurement-based topological qubit, do exist. Results were presented to a closed group at a Station Q meeting and are anticipated at the 2025 APS March Meeting. [24]

Recognition

Nayak is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a recipient of the Outstanding Young Physicist Award from the American Chapter of the Indian Physics Association, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and an NSF Early Career Award. [1] [2] [25] [26]

References

  1. 1 2 "APS Fellowship Division of Condensed Matter Physics Fellowship". American Physical Society. 2011. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  2. 1 2 "2000 Annual Report" (PDF). Sloan.org. 2000. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Nayak, Chetan (November 1996). "Theories of the Half-Filled Landau Level". ProQuest. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  4. ↑ Kelley, Alexandra (8 February 2024). "Microsoft Quantum Coming Getting DARPA Funding". Redmond Channel Partner Magazine. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  5. 1 2 3 4 "Shelly Gable, Chetan Nayak". The New York Times . 20 March 2005. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  6. ↑ Simonite, Tom (4 November 2019). "Microsoft is Taking Quantum Computers to the Cloud". Wired. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  7. 1 2 Savitsky, Zach (20 December 2023). "A ghostly quasiparticle rooted in a century-old Italian mystery could unlock quantum computing's potential—if only it could be pinned down". Science.org. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  8. ↑ Gurarie, Victor; Flohr, Michael; Nayak, Chetan (11 August 1997). "The Haldane-Rezayi quantum Hall state and conformal field theory". Nuclear Physics B. 498 (13): 513–538. arXiv: cond-mat/9701212 . Bibcode:1997NuPhB.498..513G. doi:10.1016/S0550-3213(97)00351-9 . Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  9. ↑ Freedman, Michael; Nayak, Chetan; Walker, Kevin; Wang, Zhenghan (11 August 1997). "A class of P,T-invariant topological phases of interacting electrons" (PDF). Annals of Physics. 310 (2004): 428–492. arXiv: cond-mat/0307511 . doi:10.1016/j.aop.2004.01.006 . Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  10. ↑ "Condensed Matter Theory". University of California Santa Barbara. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  11. 1 2 3 Nayak, Chetan; Simon, Steven; Stern, Ady; Freedman, Michael; Das Sarma, Sankar (2008). "Non-Abelian anyons and topological quantum computation". Reviews of Modern Physics. 80 (3): 1083. arXiv: 0707.1889 . Bibcode:2008RvMP...80.1083N. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.80.1083 . Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  12. 1 2 Wilczek, Frank (11 February 2011). "A landmark proof". Physics. 4: 10. arXiv: 1008.5194 . doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.83.075303 . Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  13. ↑ Moore, Joel (5 October 2009). "Quasiparticles do the twist". Physics. 2: 82. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.80.155303 . Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  14. 1 2 Markoff, John (23 June 2014). "Microsoft Makes Bet Quantum Computing is Next Breakthrough". The New York Times. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  15. 1 2 Zyga, Lisa (9 September 2016). "Time crystals might exist after all". Phys.org. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  16. 1 2 Nayak, Chetan; Wilczek, Frank (18 November 1996). "2n-quasihole states realize 2n−1-dimensional spinor braiding statistics in paired quantum Hall states". Nuclear Physics B. 479 (3): 529–553. arXiv: cond-mat/9605145 . doi:10.1016/0550-3213(96)00430-0 . Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  17. 1 2 Das Sarma, Sankar; Freedman, Michael; Nayak, Chetan (1 July 2006). "Topological Quantum Computation". Physics Today. 59 (7): 32-28. Bibcode:2006PhT....59g..32S. doi:10.1063/1.2337825 . Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  18. 1 2 Else, Dominic; Bauer, Bela; Nayak, Chetan (26 August 2016). "Floquet Time Crystals". Physical Review Letters. 117 (9): 090402. arXiv: 1603.08001 . Bibcode:2016PhRvL.117i0402E. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.090402. PMID   27610834 . Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  19. ↑ Das Sarma, Sankar; Freedman, Michael; Nayak, Chetan (27 April 2005). "Topologically Protected Qubits from a Possible Non-Abelian Fractional Quantum Hall State". Physical Review Letters. 94 (16): 166802. arXiv: cond-mat/0412343 . doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.090402. PMID   27610834 . Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  20. ↑ Yirka, Bob (24 June 2023). "Microsoft claims to have achieved first milestone in creating a reliable and practical quantum computer". Phys.org. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  21. ↑ "Microsoft's Majorana 1 chip carves new path for quantum computing". Microsoft. Retrieved 2025-02-19.
  22. ↑ "Microsoft has a new quantum computer – but does it actually work?". New Scientist. Retrieved 2025-02-20.
  23. ↑ "Preskill's comment on Microsoft's PR claim". LinkedIn. Retrieved 2025-02-20.
  24. ↑ "Chetan Nayak's comment on Shtetl-Optimized". Shtetl-Optimized, the Blog of Scott Aaronson.
  25. ↑ "Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellows Database". Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. 2000. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
  26. ↑ "Chetan Nayak". Aspen Center for Physics. Retrieved 2024-10-04.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.