Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics to Matthias Troyer

Matthias Troyer is the tenth awardee of the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics, which will be presented on 13 November 2019 at a symposium at the Planetarium Hamburg. “In Professor Troyer, we are honouring a scientist whose work connects myriad areas of physics and computer science. On account of his current research in the field of quantum computing, he partners with universities and companies in the US and around the world. He has also set up an open-source platform in order to share his knowledge. By awarding the prize to Professor Troyer, we also wish to recognize this contribution to collaborative research,” said Dr. Nina Lemmens, Member of the Executive Board of the Joachim Herz Stiftung, which awards the prize.

Troyer has been Full Professor for Computational Physics at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich since 1 July 2005. He studied physics for two years at the university of Linz and then moved to ETH Zurich, where he graduated. He received his PhD in theoretical physics in 1994, under the direction of Diethelm Würtz and of T. Maurice Rice for the numerical simulation of fermions in low-dimensional systems. After staying in Zurich for another year as a postdoc he moved to the University of Tokyo, where he spent three years as a fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Sciences at the Institute for Solid State Physics. In 1998 he returned to ETH Zurich as a senior assistant to continue his research and to develop and teach a series of courses in computational physics. In spring of 2000 he was awarded an assistant professorship of the Swiss National Science Foundation; in June 2002 he became Associate Professor at the ETH Zurich and in 2005 Full Professor. He also became a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Quantum in the United States in 2017. He will leave ETH Zurich at the end of June 2019 in order to focus fully on his work for Microsoft.

Troyer has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2010 and a Trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics since 2014. He was awarded the Aneesur Rahman Prize in 2016. His main research fields are the development of simulation algorithms for quantum many body systems, the investigation of quantum phase transitions, strongly correlated materials, ultracold aromic gases, and quantum devices. Troyer works at the interface between computer science and theoretical physics. In his work, he has developed new computer algorithms that provide a fuller understanding of many highly interactive quantum systems. He has carried out research on subjects such as quantum magnets, superfluid crystals, atomic gases, and exotic materials such as graphene. His studies of quantum many-body systems led to his work with quantum computers.

(Text based on a external page media release of the Joachim Herz Stiftung)