American Physical Society Establishes a New Quantum Computing Award with an Endowment from IBM Research

COLLEGE PARK, MD, March 10, 2016 – The American Physical Society (APS) has established the Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award in Quantum Computing to recognize recent, outstanding contributions in quantum information science by researchers in the field. The award particularly recognizes research involving quantum effects to perform computational and information-management tasks that would be impossible or infeasible by purely classical means.

The award is endowed by IBM Research in honor of Rolf Landauer’s and Charles H. Bennett’s pioneering work for foundational discoveries involving information and physics. The award will be given annually for outstanding quantum computing research over the past 10 years performed by a scientist within 12 years post-PhD. It will consist of a $5,000 prize, a certificate citing the contributions of the recipient, and an allowance for travel to an APS meeting to receive the award and deliver an invited lecture.

“For decades, scientists have been grappling with the grand challenge of building a universal quantum computer. The pace of scientific progress has been accelerating in recent years,” said Heike Riel, director of physical sciences, IBM Research. “The field is evolving in an exciting way and with the Landauer-Bennett Award in Quantum Computing, we want to encourage and recognize the contributions of pioneering quantum scientists.”

Further information about the award is available at the Landauer and Bennett award page.

About Landauer and Bennett

The late Rolf Landauer made many contributions to the understanding of the relationship between thermodynamics and information, the most well-known being Landauer's principle that states the minimal energy required to erase a bit. Landauer was a fellow of the APS, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a winner of the Oliver Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize. During his tenure at IBM, he became an IBM Fellow and associate director of the IBM Research division in the mid-1960s.

Charles Bennett is one of the founders of the field of quantum information and computation. Bennett is a fellow of the APS and his citation reads "for inventing reversible computation, for his analysis of Maxwell's demon, and for co-inventing quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation." Quantum teleportation is a key primitive in quantum computation and plays a significant role in current methods for quantum error correction and universal quantum computation. Bennett’s work helped establish quantum information science as a coherent discipline, one that illuminates other areas of physics and has important practical applications. Bennett is an IBM Fellow and a member of IBM’s Quantum Information Group.

About IBM Research

For more than seven decades, IBM Research has defined the future of information technology with more than 3,000 researchers in 12 labs located across six continents. Scientists from IBM Research have produced six Nobel Laureates, 10 U.S. National Medals of Technology, five U.S. National Medals of Science, six Turing Awards, 19 inductees in the National Academy of Sciences and 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame. For more information, please visit www.research.ibm.com.

Contacts: James Riordon, APS, riordon@aps.org, (301) 209-3238; Christine Vu, Media Relations, IBM Research, vuch@us.ibm.com, (914) 945-2755

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The American Physical Society is a nonprofit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy, and international activities. APS represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories, and industry in the United States and throughout the world.