Wojciech H. Zurek

Wojciech Hubert Zurek (born 1951) is a well-known physicist and a Laboratory Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a leading authority on quantum theory, especially decoherence, and other physics topics. His work also has a lot of potential benefit to the emerging field of quantum computing.

Zurek was educated in Kraków, Poland (M.Sc. 1974) and Austin, Texas (Ph.D. 1979). He spent two years at Caltech as a Tolman Fellow, and started at LANL as a J. Oppenheimer Fellow. He was the leader of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at Los Alamos from 1991 until he was made a Laboratory Fellow in the Theory Division in 1996. Zurek is currently a foreign associate of the Cosmology Program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He served as a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute, and has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Zurek co-organized the Quantum Coherence and Decoherence as well as the Quantum Computing and Chaos Programs at UCSB's Institute for Theoretical Physics.

He researches decoherence, physics of quantum and classical information, foundations of statistical and of quantum physics, and astrophysics. He is also the co-author, along with William Wootters and Dennis Dieks, of a proof stating that a single quantum cannot be cloned (see the no cloning theorem). He also coined the term einselection.

External links

* [http://public.lanl.gov/whz/ Wojciech H. Zurek's webpage]