David J. Wineland

David J. Wineland (born 1944) is an American physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology who shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics with Serge Haroche for ground breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulating individual quantum systems. He was the first to laser cool trapped ions, in 1978, and his group created the first single atom quantum logic gate in 1995 and achieved the first quantum teleportation of a massive particle in 2004, experimental techniques that became foundational tools for building trapped ion quantum computers.