Prof. Matthias Troyer is a Principal Researcher in the Quantum Architectures and Computation Group at Microsoft Research. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics, and recipient of the Rahman Prize for Computational Physics of the American Physical Society. After receiving his PhD in 1994 from ETH Zurich he spent three years as postdoc at the University of Tokyo before returning to ETH Zurich. There he has been professor of Computational Physics until taking leave of absence to join Microsoft's quantum computing program at the beginning of this year.

Abstract:
Following experimental realizations of small but scalable quantum computers we may soon see the first quantum computers with the potential to outperform the fastest classical computers. It is thus timely to identify application problems that a quantum computer could solve better than any classical supercomputer. Despite the challenges posed by mature classical computing technology we can identify several interesting application areas for quantum computers that can make the efforts to build a quantum computer not only a scientifically but also a commercially interesting endeavor. These include materials science and quantum chemistry as the “native" applications of quantum technology. A closer look at these algorithms reveals that in parallel to the development of quantum computing hardware, a strong effort in quantum software engineering and algorithmic optimization is needed to make quantum computers competitive for a wide range of applications.

Contact: Lei Wang, 9853