David P. DiVincenzo

Biosketch

David P. DiVincenzo has, since 2010, been Director of the institutes “Theoretical Nanoelectronics” and “Quantum Information” at the Jülich Research Center, and is a Professor of Physics at Aachen University. He earned the Bachelor, the Master, and the PhD degrees, all in Electrical Engineering, at the University of Pennsylvania. After two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Atomic and Solid State Physics at Cornell University, he joined the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member. In his 25 years at IBM, he served in a variety of research and management positions. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and and was recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for Research in Germany upon his arrival in Jülich and Aachen. He continues to serve, having started in 2011, as Associate Editor for Quantum Information of the Reviews of Modern Physics.

Research Interests

David DiVincenzo has done research in many areas of theoretical solid state physics. In the area of materials physics, his work has contributed to the understanding of graphite and its compounds, of grain boundaries in silicon, of disorder effects in metallic conductors at low temperature, and of the quantum dynamics of organic and inorganic magnetic particles. Since 1993, quantum information and quantum computing has been the major focus. He articulated the criteria for achieving quantum computation in the lab, and developed concepts for solid state qubits, including those comprising single electrons in quantum dots. He contributed to fundamental quantum communication concepts such as remote quantum state preparation. He has developed theoretical tools for the analysis of scalable quantum computers, both using electrical circuit models, and by developing the concepts of quantum error correction.