Nikolas P. Breuckmann (born 1988) is a German mathematical physicist affiliated with the

University of Bristol The University of Bristol is a public university, public research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Merchant Venturers' school founded in 1595 and University College, Br ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

. He is, as of Spring 2024, a visiting scientist and program organizer at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. His research focuses on

quantum information Quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information theory, and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques. Quantum information refers to both t ...

theory, in particular

quantum error correction Quantum error correction (QEC) is a set of techniques used in quantum computing to protect quantum information from errors due to decoherence and other quantum noise. Quantum error correction is theorised as essential to achieve fault tolerant ...

and

quantum complexity theory Quantum complexity theory is the subfield of computational complexity theory that deals with complexity classes defined using quantum computers, a computational model based on quantum mechanics. It studies the hardness of computational problems ...

. He is known for his work (together with Anurag Anshu and Chinmay Nirkhe) on proving the NLTS conjecture, a famous open problem in quantum information theory.

Education and early life

Breuckmann was born in

Duisburg Duisburg (; , ) is a city in the Ruhr metropolitan area of the western States of Germany, German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Lying on the confluence of the Rhine (Lower Rhine) and the Ruhr (river), Ruhr rivers in the center of the Rhine-Ruh ...

and grew up in

Waltrop Waltrop ( is a town in the Recklinghausen (district), district of Recklinghausen, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is situated on the Datteln-Hamm Canal, approximately 15 km east of Recklinghausen and 15 km north-west of Dortmund. ...

North Rhine-Westphalia North Rhine-Westphalia or North-Rhine/Westphalia, commonly shortened to NRW, is a States of Germany, state () in Old states of Germany, Western Germany. With more than 18 million inhabitants, it is the List of German states by population, most ...

, Germany. He earned a BSc in Mathematics and a BSc, an MSc and a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in Physics from

RWTH Aachen University RWTH Aachen University (), in German ''Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen'', is a German public research university located in Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With more than 47,000 students enrolled in 144 study prog ...

. His doctoral thesis was titled "Homological Quantum Codes Beyond the Toric Code" and he was supervised by Barbara Terhal.

Career and research

After his PhD, he deferred his

University College London University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...

Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Quantum Technologies funded by

EPSRC The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to univers ...

for a year to work for

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

-based

quantum computing A quantum computer is a computer that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena. On small scales, physical matter exhibits properties of wave-particle duality, both particles and waves, and quantum computing takes advantage of this behavior using s ...

start-up PsiQuantum, which was co-founded by Jeremy O'Brien and Terry Rudolph (among other scientists). In 2022, he became Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Quantum Computing Theory at the University of Bristol. In 2023, he was awarded the James Clerk Maxwell Medal and Prize by the

Institute of Physics The Institute of Physics (IOP) is a UK-based not-for-profit learned society and professional body that works to advance physics education, physics research, research and applied physics, application. It was founded in 1874 and has a worldwide ...

for his "outstanding contributions to the quantum error correction field, particularly work on proving the no low-energy trivial state conjecture, a famous open problem in quantum information theory".

Quanta Magazine ''Quanta Magazine'' is an editorially independent online publication of the Simons Foundation covering developments in physics, mathematics, biology and computer science. History ''Quanta Magazine'' was initially launched as ''Simons Science ...

described the proof as "one of the biggest developments in theoretical computer science". This result built on his introduction with Jens Eberhardt of “Balanced Product Quantum Codes”. The NLTS conjecture posits that there exist families of Hamiltonians with all low-energy states of non-trivial complexity. It was formulated in 2013 by

Fields Medal The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of Mathematicians, International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a meeting that takes place e ...

list

Michael Freedman Michael Hartley Freedman (born April 21, 1951) is an American mathematician at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the 4-dimensional gen ...

and Matthew Hastings at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

. The conjecture was proven by Breuckmann and colleagues (Anurag Anshu and Chinmay Nirkhe) by showing that the recently discovered families of constant-rate and linear-distance low-density parity-check (LDPC) quantum codes correspond to NLTS local Hamiltonians. This result is a step towards proving the quantum PCP conjecture, considered the most important open problem in quantum complexity theory. He and his former doctoral student Oscar Higgott are inventors of a U.S. patent titled “Subsystem codes with high thresholds by gauge fixing and reduced qubit overhead”, which concerns a technique to significantly improve the performance of quantum error correction in quantum computers. Their related work was included as a major development for computer science in 2023 by Quanta.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Breuckmann, Nikolas German mathematicians German physicists 1988 births Living people Maxwell Medal and Prize recipients Quantum information scientists