David P. DiVincenzo

David P. DiVincenzo (born 1959 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American theoretical physicist known for defining the basic physical requirements a quantum computer must satisfy. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD from Cornell University under Eugene J. Mele. He worked for many years at IBM, where in 1996 he published Topics in Quantum Computing, setting out what became known as the DiVincenzo criteria, minimal physical requirements a system must meet to function as a quantum computer, spanning scalable qubits, reliable initialization, universal quantum gates, sufficiently long decoherence times and reliable measurement, later extended with further criteria for quantum communication; the criteria went on to influence much of the experimental effort to build working quantum computers. In 1997, with Daniel Loss, he proposed the Loss-DiVincenzo quantum computer, a scheme using the spins of electrons confined in quantum dots as qubits. He later became director of the Institute of Theoretical Nanoelectronics at the Peter Grunberg Institute, part of Forschungszentrum Julich, and a professor at the Institute for Quantum Information at RWTH Aachen University, and received an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship in 2011.