Matthias Troyer: Honored for his Work on Quantum Many-Body Systems

The 2019 Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics will be presented to Austrian Matthias Troyer, Professor for Computational Physics at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich and quantum computing researcher at software company Microsoft. He is receiving the prize for his contributions to the development of quantum Monte Carlo algorithms.

Using random numbers, these algorithms can predict how tiny particles will interact within quantum mechanical many-body systems such as atoms and molecules. As a result, Troyer is playing a key role in basic research and the ongoing development of quantum computers and superconductive materials. He is one of just a handful of leading international researchers in this field. The Joachim Herz Stiftung awards the prize in conjunction with the University of Hamburg and the German Electron Synchrotron DESY.

The Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics is worth 137,036 Euro in total – a figure that plays on Sommerfeld’s fine-structure constant. As such, it is one of the most valuable German prizes for physics. Troyer is the tenth winner of the prize.