John M. Martinis

John M. Martinis
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley (B.S., Ph.D.)
AwardsFritz London Memorial Prize, 2014[1] John Stewart Bell Prize, 2021[2]
Scientific career
Thesis Macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy-level quantization in the zero voltage state of the current-biased Josephson junction[3]  (1985)
Doctoral advisorJohn Clarke[3]

John M. Martinis (born 1958) is an American physicist and a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2014, the Google Quantum A.I. Lab announced that it had hired Martinis and his team in a multimillion dollar deal to build a quantum computer using superconducting qubits.[4]

Career

[edit]
John Martinis (2017)

John M. Martinis received his B.S. in physics in 1980 and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley. During his Ph.D., he investigated the quantum behaviour of a macroscopic variable, the phase difference across a Josephson tunnel junction.[5]

He joined the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique in Saclay, France, for a first postdoc and then the Electromagnetic Technology division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, where he worked on superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) amplifiers.[6] While at NIST he developed a technique of X-ray detection by using a superconducting transition-edge sensor microcalorimeter with electrothermal feedback.[7]

Since 2002 he has been working with Josephson-Junction qubits with the aim of building the first quantum computer.[8]

In 2004 he moved to the University of California Santa Barbara, where he held the Worster Chair in experimental physics until 2017. In 2014, Martinis' team was hired by Google to build the first useful quantum computer.[8]

On October 23, 2019, Martinis and his team published a paper on Nature with title "Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor",[9] where they presented how they achieved quantum supremacy (hereby disproving the extended Church–Turing thesis) for the first time using a 53-qubits quantum computer.[10] In April 2020, Wired magazine announced that Martinis reportedly resigned from Google after being reassigned to an advisory role.[11] On September 29, 2020, it was announced that Martinis had moved to Australia to join Silicon Quantum Computing, a start-up founded by Professor Michelle Simmons.[12]

In 2021, he received the John Stewart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and Their Applications.[2]

References

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  1. ^ "Fritz London Memorial Prize". phy.duke.edu. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  2. ^ a b "John Stewart Bell Prize". Retrieved 3 May 2021.
  3. ^ a b "Physics Tree - John M. Martinis". academictree.org. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  4. ^ Finley, Klint (2014-09-05). "The Man Who Will Build Google's Elusive Quantum Computer". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2019-11-02.
  5. ^ Clarke, J.; Cleland, A. N.; Devoret, M. H.; Esteve, D.; Martinis, J. M. (1988-02-26). "Quantum mechanics of a macroscopic variable: the phase difference of a josephson junction". Science. 239 (4843): 992–997. doi:10.1126/science.239.4843.992. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 17815701. S2CID 1732678.
  6. ^ Welty, Richard P.; Martinis, John M. (March 1993). "Two-stage integrated SQUID amplifier with series array output". IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. 3: 2605–2608. doi:10.1109/77.233523. ISSN 1051-8223. S2CID 33500389.
  7. ^ Irwin, K. D.; Hilton, G. C.; Wollman, D. A.; Martinis, John M. (1998-08-05). "X‐ray detection using a superconducting transition‐edge sensor microcalorimeter with electrothermal feedback". Applied Physics Letters. 69 (13): 1945. doi:10.1063/1.117630. ISSN 0003-6951.
  8. ^ a b "Google AI John Martinis". ai.google. Retrieved 2019-11-03.
  9. ^ Arute, Frank; Arya, Kunal; Babbush, Ryan; Bacon, Dave; Bardin, Joseph C.; Barends, Rami; Biswas, Rupak; Boixo, Sergio; Brandao, Fernando G. S. L.; Buell, David A.; Burkett, Brian (October 2019). "Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor". Nature. 574 (7779): 505–510. arXiv:1910.11333. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1666-5. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 31645734.
  10. ^ "Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off". 23 October 2019. Retrieved 2019-11-04.
  11. ^ "Google's Head of Quantum Computing Hardware Resigns". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2020-04-21.
  12. ^ "Ex-Google quantum chief joins Simmons' silicon startup". InnovationAus. 2020-09-29. Retrieved 2020-09-29.
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