Daniel Lidar

Daniel A. Lidar
Born	1968 Jerusalem
Residence	USA
Citizenship	USA
Fields	Electrical Engineering and Chemistry and Physics
Institutions	UC Berkeley University of Toronto University of Southern California
Alma mater	Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Doctoral advisor	Robert Benny Gerber Ofer Biham
Doctoral students	Masoud Mohseni, Kaveh Khodjasteh, Joseph Geraci, Alireza Shabani, Soraya Taghavi

Daniel A. Lidar is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Chemistry, and the Director and co-founder of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology (CQIST), notable for his research on control of quantum systems and quantum information processing.

Education

He is class of 1986 graduate of the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West. He received his B.Sc. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1989, performed national service from 1989–1993, received his M.Sc. in 1993, and obtained his PhD under Robert Benny Gerber and Ofer Biham, 1997, with a thesis entitled Structural Characterization of Disordered Systems also from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Career

In 1997-2000, he was a postdoc at UC Berkeley, having been awarded Rothschild Foundation and Fulbright Program fellowships (the latter of which he declined); in 2000-2005, he was an assistant professor and then later an associate professor of Chemistry at the University of Toronto, with cross-appointments in Physics and Mathematics. While at Berkeley, he was a collaborator with Magiq Technologies^[1] and while at Toronto he collaborated with D-Wave Systems.^[2][3] He moved to the University of Southern California in 2005 as an associate professor of Chemistry and Electrical Engineering, with a cross-appointment in Physics. Lidar's research interests lie primarily in the theory and control of open quantum systems, with a special emphasis on quantum information processing. His past interests include scattering theory and fractals.

Honors

He is the recipient of a number of awards and honors, including a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Young Explorer Award given by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research for the top 20 researchers in Canada under age 40, and the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Chemistry awarded by the Ontario Council of Graduate Studies.^[4] He is a 2007 Fellow of the American Physical Society^[5] and Senior Member of the IEEE. He is listed as one of the top 20 authors of the decade 2000-2009 in Quantum Computing by Thomson Reuters' Sciencewatch. In 2009 he was elected an Outstanding Referee of the American Physical Society.

Research

Lidar's research in quantum information processing has focused primarily on methods for overcoming decoherence. He wrote some of the founding papers on decoherence-free subspaces, most notably his widely cited paper "Decoherence-free subspaces for quantum computation",^[6] and their generalization, noiseless subsystems. These contributions were noted in his APS Fellow citation.^[7] He has also made major contributions to dynamical decoupling, in particular the invention (with his student Kaveh Khodjasteh) of the concatenated dynamical decoupling (CDD) method.^[8] He has made a proposal to protect adiabatic quantum computation against decoherence, using dynamical decoupling, one of the only proposals to date dealing with error correction for the adiabatic model.^[9] Lidar has also worked on quantum algorithms, having written some of the pioneering papers in the subject on simulation of classical statistical mechanics^[10] and quantum chemistry.^[11] In his Ph.D. work he made a widely cited observation on the limited scaling range of empirically observed fractals,^[12] which led to a lively exchange with Benoit Mandelbrot.^[13]

Patents

He holds four U.S. patents in the area of quantum computing. ^{[1] [2] [3] [14]}

See also

• Quantum Aspects of Life (book)
• "Attack of the quantum worms", New Scientist, 29 October 2005, pp. 30–33
• "Single field shapes quantum bits", Technology Research News, November 3/10, 2004
• "Sturdy quantum computing demoed", Technology Research News, April 7/14, 2004
• "World Computations", Lifestyles Magazine Vol. 31, No. 182, 2002, pp. 38–40 (an interview)
• "Quantum Protection", NSERC Newsbureau Bulletin No. 46, published April 25, 2002
• "A quantum leap in the way computers think", Toronto Star, March 28, 2002, National Report section
• "Alternative quantum bits go natural", Technology Research News, April 2001
• "Quantum Computers", Chemical & Engineering News cover story, November 2000
• "Haven for Quantum Computation", Science, Editor’s Choice, September 2000
• "Quantum Computing for Chemists", New Scientist, August 1998

References

• Sciencewatch lists of top 20 authors in Quantum Computing

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} US 7184555, Whaley, K. Birgit; Daniel Lidar & Julia Kempe et al., "Quantum computation", issued 2007 .
2. ^ ^{a b} US 7018852, Wu, Lian-Ao; Daniel Lidar & Alexandre Blais, "Methods for single qubit gate teleportation", issued 2006 .
3. ^ ^{a b} US 7307275, Lidar, Daniel; Lian-Ao Wu & Alexandre Blais, "Encoding and error suppression for superconducting quantum computers", issued 2007 .
4. ^ "List of John Charles Polanyi prize winners". http://ocgs.cou.on.ca/_bin/home/polanyi/prizeWinners.cfm. 
5. ^ "2007 Fellows of the American Physical Society". http://www.aps.org/units/gqi/fellowship/index.cfm?year=2007. 
6. ^ D.A. Lidar, I.L. Chuang, and K.B. Whaley, "Decoherence-Free Subspaces for Quantum Computation", Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 2594 (1998)
7. ^ APS Fellow citation
8. ^ K. Khodjasteh and D.A. Lidar, "Fault-Tolerant Quantum Dynamical Decoupling", Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 180501 (2005)
9. ^ Daniel A. Lidar, "Towards Fault Tolerant Adiabatic Quantum Computation", Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 160506 (2008)
10. ^ D.A. Lidar and O. Biham, "Simulating Ising Spin Glasses on a Quantum Computer", Phys. Rev. E 56, 3661 (1997)
11. ^ D.A. Lidar and H. Wang, "Calculating the Thermal Rate Constant with Exponential Speedup on a Quantum Computer", Phys. Rev. E 59, 2429 (1999)
12. ^ D. Avnir, O. Biham, D.A. Lidar, and O. Malcai, "Is the Geometry of Nature Fractal?", Science 279, 39 (1998)
13. ^ B.B Mandelbrot, P. Pfeifer, O. Biham, O. Malcai, D.A. Lidar, and D. Avnir, "Is Nature Fractal?", Science 279, 783 (1998)
14. ^ US 7364923, Lidar, Daniel & Lian-Ao Wu, "Dressed qubits", issued 2008 .

External links

• Sciencewatch interview with Lidar
• Lidar's USC profile
• Lidar's homepage
• Lidar at the ACM portal
• Lidar's math genealogy
• Lidar's Qwiki profile
• Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology (CQIST) at USC

Persondata
Name	Lidar, Daniel
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1968
Place of birth	Jerusalem
Date of death
Place of death