Amazon Scholar receives American Physical Society quantum computing honor

Liang Jiang, a professor at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and an Amazon Scholar working within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Center for Quantum Computing, is the recipient of the 2022 American Physical Society’s (APS) Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award in Quantum Computing, which recognizes outstanding contributions by researchers in quantum information science.

In announcing the honor, APS said Jiang is being recognized for his substantial contributions to quantum information science, “with emphasis on exploiting novel error correction strategies to enhance performance in a manner compatible with state-of-the-art experimental platforms, and for helping establish new foundations for fault-tolerant and practical quantum communication, computing, and sensing.”

Jiang theoretically investigates quantum systems and quantum applications, such as quantum sensing, quantum transduction, quantum communication, and quantum computation. His research focuses on using quantum control and error correction to protect quantum information from decoherence to realize robust quantum information processing. He has worked on modular quantum computation, global-scale quantum networks, room-temperature nano-magnetometer, sub-wavelength imaging, microwave-optical quantum transduction, and error-correction-assisted quantum sensing and simulation.

 “I am deeply honored to receive the Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award,” said Jiang, who also recently was named an APS fellow. “It is an exciting time to explore novel quantum phenomena and various quantum applications.”

The annual award, first established in 2016, is endowed by IBM Research in honor of Rolf Landauer’s and Charles H. Bennett’s pioneering work involving information and physics. Landauer made many contributions to the understanding of the relationship between thermodynamics and information, the most well-known being Landauer’s principle that states the minimal energy required to erase a bit. Bennett is one of the founders of the field of quantum information and computation.

At Amazon, Jiang is investigating novel approaches for fault tolerant quantum information processing.

“Liang’s work on fault tolerance within the AWS Center for Quantum Computing is super important to our quantum ambitions, since fault tolerance is required if we’re going to fully realize the long-term potential of quantum computers,” said Simone Severini, director, AWS Quantum Computing.

Jiang has published extensively in the area of quantum optics, quantum information, and quantum technologies.

He earned his bachelor of science degree in physics from Caltech in 2004 and his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 2009. After working as a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, Jiang joined the Yale University faculty in 2012 as an assistant professor of physics before becoming an associate professor in 2018.  One year later, he joined the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering faculty as a professor.  Jiang joined Amazon as a scholar in April 2020.

This is the second honor within the month for a scientist working on the AWS quantum computing effort. Helmut Katzgraber, senior practice manager of the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab, was recently elected an APS fellow.

More information about the company’s Amazon Scholars and Amazon Visiting Academics programs is available here.  Additional information about Amazon’s quantum computing initiative is available here, and on the team’s blog.