Michel Devoret, Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Applied Physics & Physics and Robert Schoelkopf, Sterling Professor of Applied Physics and Physics, and have been awarded the Fritz London Memorial Prize. Schoelkopf and Devoret are sharing this prize with John Martinis of University of California, Santa Barbara.
The Fritz London Prize was founded in 1957 to recognize scientists who made outstanding contributions to the advances of the field of Low Temperature Physics. Devoret, Schoelkopf, and Martinis are being recognized for their outstanding contributions to the field of super computing. Their work to create super computers is often conducted near absolute zero — nearly -460F — a temperature that enables materials to act as super-conductors.
At Yale, Devoret and Schoelkopf collaborate with one another to improve quantum error correction, a major hurdle of to the realization of quantum computers. Previously, Devoret and Martinis studied the movement of super-conducting electrons under John Clark, winner of the Fritz London Memorial Prize in 1987.
Devoret, Schoelkopf, and Martinis were presented with the award at the 27th Annual International Low Temperature Conference sponsored by the IUPAP (International Union of Pure and Applied Physics) on August 6th in Buenos Aires, Argentina.