Chetan Nayak
{{Short description|American computer scientist}}
{{Infobox scientist
| image = ChetanNK.jpg
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| birth_place = New York City, NY, United States
| death_date =
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| field = Quantum computing, Computer Science
| work_institution = Microsoft
| alma_mater = {{Plainlist|
| thesis_title = Theories of the half-filled Landau level {{r|Dissertation}}
| thesis_year = 1996
| doctoral_advisor =Frank Wilczek {{r|Dissertation}}
| prizes = {{Plainlist|
- APS Fellow (2011){{r|APS}}
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship {{r|Report}}
- NSF Early Career Award
- Outstanding Young Physicist Award
}}
}}
{{Use dmy dates|cs1-dates=ly|date=January 2022}}
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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.{{r|DARPA}} He joined Microsoft in 2005 and became director and general manager of Quantum Hardware at Microsoft Station Q at Microsoft Research in 2014.{{r|NYT}}{{r|Wired}}{{r|Ghostly}}
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.{{r|NYT}}{{r|Dissertation}} His dissertation on "Theories of the half-filled Landau level" was completed under Frank Wilczek.{{r|Dissertation}}
In 1996, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Berkeley (UCSB) and a professor of physics at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1997 to 2006.{{r|NYT}}{{r|Haldane}}{{r|Invariant}}
He joined Microsoft in 2005 as a visiting researcher in Redmond, Washington, and the faculty of UCSB in 2007 where he has served as a technical fellow and professor of condensed matter theory through 2024.{{r|NYT}}{{r|Ghostly}}{{r|UCSB}}{{r|Anyons}}
Nayak has contributed to the theory of topological phases, high-temperature superconductivity, the quantum Hall effect, and phases of periodically driven quantum systems.{{r|Landmark}}{{r|Quasiparticles}}{{r|Breakthrough}}{{r|Crystals}}{{r|2n}}{{r|Anyons}}{{r|TQC}}{{r|Floquet}}
Scientific work
In 1996, Nayak and Wilczek discovered the type of non-Abelian statistics in paired quantum Hall states associated with Majorana zero modes.{{r|2n}}
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.{{r|Breakthrough}}{{r|Topologically}} In 2006 and 2008, Das Sarma, Freedman and Nayak developed theoretical proposals for topological quantum computing based on non-abelian anyons.{{r|TQC}}{{r|Anyons}}
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.{{r|Landmark}}
In 2016, with Dominic Else and Bela Bauer, he developed Floquet time crystals and predicted its occurrence in periodically driven systems.{{r|Crystals}}{{r|Floquet}}
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. {{r|Practical}}
In February 2025, the Microsoft Quantum team announced the creation of a chip powered by a topological architecture.{{r|Majorana1}} 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.{{r|Majorana1NS}}{{r|Majorana1Preskill}} 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.{{r|Majorana1CNSA}}
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.{{r|APS}}{{r|Report}}{{r|Sloan}}{{r|Aspen}}
References
External links
- {{Google Scholar id|WRL78vEAAAAJ}}
{{Microsoft Research}}
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Category:American computer scientists
Category:Princeton University alumni
Category:Harvard University alumni
Category:Microsoft Research people