Pedram Roushan is an Iranian-American physicist working at

Google AI Google AI is a division of Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. It was announced at Google I/O 2017 by CEO Sundar Pichai. This division has expanded its reach with research facilities in various parts of the world such as Zurich, Pa ...

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 ...

and quantum simulation.

Biography

Pedram Roushan was born in

Sari A sari (also called sharee, saree or sadi)The name of the garment in various regional languages include: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * is a drape (cloth) and a women's garment in the Indian subcontinent. It consists of an un-sti ...

, Iran in 1978 and raised in Iran. His family belonged to the

Baháʼí Faith The Baháʼí Faith is a religion founded in the 19th century that teaches the Baháʼí Faith and the unity of religion, essential worth of all religions and Baháʼí Faith and the unity of humanity, the unity of all people. Established by ...

and suffered prosecution and discrimination after the

Islamic Revolution The Iranian Revolution (, ), also known as the 1979 Revolution, or the Islamic Revolution of 1979 (, ) was a series of events that culminated in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979. The revolution led to the replacement of the Im ...

. Roushan's parents were laid-off from their jobs due to their beliefs, and his father had to spend several years in hiding. In 1984 and to escape the persecution, with his family they lived in a small village close to

Gilan province Gilan Province () is one of the 31 provinces of Iran, in the northwest of the country and southwest of the Caspian Sea. Its capital is the city of Rasht. The province lies along the Caspian Sea, in Iran's Regions of Iran, Region 3, west of ...

, where Roushan attended elementary school. In 1996, Roushan was denied access to Iranian universities. He enrolled at the ''Baháʼí Institute for Higher Education'', where he obtained a degree in civil engineering. In 2001 and with the help of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS), he moved to the US as a religious refugee and attended the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

, where he graduated ''summa cum laude'' in 2005. He completed his PhD in the group of Ali Yazdani at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

in 2011, where he studies diluted magnetic semiconductors and also performed the first

scanning tunneling microscopy A scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is a type of scanning probe microscope used for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. Its development in 1981 earned its inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, then at IBM Zürich, the Nobel Prize in ...

on the surface of

topological insulators A topological insulator is a material whose interior behaves as an electrical insulator while its surface behaves as an electrical conductor, meaning that electrons can only move along the surface of the material. A topological insulator is an ...

. He then moved to 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, United States. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an ...

as a postdoc, where he worked in John Martinis' group on building a

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

based on

superconducting qubit Superconducting quantum computing is a branch of solid state physics and quantum computing that implements superconducting electronic circuits using superconducting qubits as artificial atoms, or quantum dots. For superconducting qubits, the two ...

s. In 2014 he joined

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

together with the Martinis team and was part of the group performing the first claimed

quantum supremacy ''Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything'' is a non-fiction book by the American futurist and physicist Michio Kaku. The book, Kaku's eleventh, was initially published on 2 May 2023 by Doubleday. The book ...

demonstration on Google's

Sycamore processor Sycamore is a transmon superconducting quantum processor created by Google's Artificial Intelligence division. It has 53 qubits. In 2019, Sycamore completed a task in 200 seconds that Google claimed, in a ''Nature'' paper, would take a state-o ...

. He is currently a Staff Research Scientist with Google and leads the experimental effort on noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) algorithms, focusing on simulating quantum phenomena on NISQ processors. With his team and their collaborators, they have studied information scrambling in quantum circuits, non-equilibrium dynamics and

universality class In statistical mechanics, a universality class is a collection of mathematical models which share a single scale-invariant limit under the process of renormalization group flow. While the models within a class may differ dramatically at finite sc ...

es in quantum spin models, phases of matter away from equilibrium, e.g.

time crystal In condensed matter physics, a time crystal is a quantum system of particles whose lowest-energy state is one in which the particles are in repetitive motion. The system cannot lose energy to the environment and come to rest because it is alread ...

s and measurement-induced entanglement phases, quantum statistics of abelian and non-abelian excitations of the Kitaev

toric code The toric code is a topological quantum error correcting code, and an example of a stabilizer code, defined on a two-dimensional spin lattice. It is the simplest and most well studied of the quantum double models. It is also the simplest example ...

model. As of November 2023, Roushan has published more than 70 articles in peer-reviewed journals which have been cited over 25,000 times (

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with success indicators such as winning t ...

of 50). At the 18th Capri Spring School in 2024, he coined the term "discoverino" to refer to small discoveries first made by NISQ devices, but could also be made in theory or by using substantial classical computing resources.

Publications (selected)

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References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Roushan, Pedram 21st-century American physicists Quantum physicists Quantum information scientists 21st-century Iranian physicists Google employees University of Pittsburgh alumni Princeton University alumni 1978 births Living people