Pittsburgh Quantum Institute Distinguished Seminar - Matthias Troyer and Chetan Nayak
— 5:00pm
Location:
In Person
-
Rashid Auditorium, Gates Hillman 4401
Speaker:
MATTHIAS TROYER and CHETAN NAYAK
,
Matthias, Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President of Quantum
Chetan, Technical Fellow
Microsoft
Utility-Scale Quantum Computing with Topological Qubits
Tuesday, December 2, 2025, 3:30 – 5pm PQI hosts Dr. Matthias Troyer and Dr. Chetan Nayak from Microsoft, who will present, Utility-Scale Quantum Computing with Topological Qubits.
About the Speakers
► Dr. Matthias Troyer is accountable for architecting Microsoft’s quantum computer and applications. His work at Microsoft is focused on accelerating scientific discovery globally by bringing to bear the benefits of a scaled, fault tolerant quantum system to the world ins secure and responsible ways. He received his PhD from ETH Zurich in Switzerland in 1994. Afterwards, he spent time as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo, then returned to ETH Zurich as a Computational Physics professor. He joined Microsoft in 2017. Dr. Troyer is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and President of the Aspen Center for Physics. He is the recipient of the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics and the Rahman Prize for Computational Physics of the American Physical Society “… for pioneering numerical work in many seemingly intractable areas of quantum… physics and for providing efficient sophisticated computer codes to the community.”
► Dr. Chetan Nayak has been a researcher at Microsoft since 2005. He was born and raised in New York City, where he graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1988. He received his B.A. from Harvard in 1992 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1996. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB from 1996-97. He was a Professor of Physics at UCLA from 1997 through 2006 and at UCSB from 2007 through the present. He was a visiting Professor at Nihon University in Japan in 2002. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and 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. He has been the Principal Research Manager of Microsoft Station Q since 2014.
Chetan has made significant contributions to the theory of topological phases, high-temperature superconductivity, ‘strange metals’, the effects of impurities on electronic behavior, the quantum Hall effect, and phases of periodically-driven quantum systems. In 1996, Chetan and Frank Wilczek discovered the type of non-Abelian statistics associated with Majorana zero modes, which will be the building block of Microsoft’s quantum computer. His subsequent work in 2005 with Michael Freedman and Sankar Das Sarma sparked attempts to build a topological quantum computer using the 5/2 fractional quantum Hall state. In 2008, he was the lead author of an influential article surveying the field of topological quantum computing. In 2016, he repaired and revived the concept of a “time crystal” with Dominic Else and Bela Bauer and predicted its occurrence in periodically-driven systems, which was experimentally verified shortly thereafter. The 2016 paper that he and several co-authors wrote on Majorana zero mode device designs serves as a guide for Microsoft’s quantum effort.
Under his leadership, Microsoft’s quantum team published papers demonstrating topological superconductivity in nanowires and single-shot readout of the parity state of a pair of Majorana zero modes.
Event Type: Seminars
Room Number: In Person
Building: Rashid Auditorium, Gates Hillman 4401
Speaker's Name: MATTHIAS TROYER and CHETAN NAYAK
Speaker's Professional Title: Matthias, Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President of Quantum, Chetan, Technical Fellow, Microsoft
Talk Title: Utility-Scale Quantum Computing with Topological Qubits
Event Poster Title: Poster with QR Code
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Robotics Institute (RI)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, PQI, Department of Physics
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: calendar.pitt.edu…