John M. Martinis (born 1958) is an American physicist and a professor of physics at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...

. In 2014, the Google Quantum A.I. Lab announced that it had hired Martinis and his team in a multimillion dollar deal to build a quantum computer using superconducting qubits.

Career

John M. Martinis received his B.S. in physics in 1980 and his Ph.D. in physics from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. During his Ph.D., he investigated the quantum behaviour of a macroscopic variable, the phase difference across a Josephson tunnel junction. He joined the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique in Saclay, France, for a first postdoc and then the Electromagnetic Technology division at the

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...

(NIST) in Boulder, where he worked on superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) amplifiers. While at NIST he developed a technique of X-ray detection by using a superconducting transition-edge sensor microcalorimeter with electrothermal feedback. Since 2002 he has been working with Josephson-Junction qubits with the aim of building the first quantum computer. In 2004 he moved to the

University of California Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the Un ...

, where he held the Worster Chair in experimental physics until 2017. In 2014, Martinis' team was hired by Google to build the first useful quantum computer. On October 23, 2019, Martinis and his team published a paper on Nature with title "Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor", where they presented how they achieved

quantum supremacy In quantum computing, quantum supremacy or quantum advantage is the goal of demonstrating that a programmable quantum device can solve a problem that no classical computer can solve in any feasible amount of time (irrespective of the usefulness of ...

(hereby disproving the extended

Church–Turing thesis In computability theory, the Church–Turing thesis (also known as computability thesis, the Turing–Church thesis, the Church–Turing conjecture, Church's thesis, Church's conjecture, and Turing's thesis) is a thesis about the nature of comp ...

) for the first time using a 53-qubits quantum computer. In April 2020, Wired magazine announced that Martinis reportedly resigned from Google after being reassigned to an advisory role. On September 29, 2020, it was announced that Martinis had moved to Australia to join Silicon Quantum Computing, a start-up founded by Professor

Michelle Simmons Michelle Yvonne Simmons, (born 14 July 1967) is a Scientia Professor of Quantum Physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of New South Wales and has twice been an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and is an Australian Res ...

. In 2021, he received the

John Stewart Bell Prize The John Stewart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and their Applications (short form: Bell Prize) was established in 2009, funded and managed by the University of Toronto, Centre for Quantum Information & Quantu ...

for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and Their Applications.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Martinis, John M 1958 births Living people University of California, Berkeley alumni 20th-century American physicists 21st-century American physicists University of California, Santa Barbara faculty Google employees Fellows of the American Physical Society