Shruti Puri, assistant professor in applied physics and physics, received the Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award in Quantum Computing, which recognizes recent outstanding contributions in quantum information science, especially using quantum effects to perform computational and information-management tasks that would be impossible or infeasible by purely classical means. She earned the award,
For advancing the theoretical understanding of quantum fault-tolerance in the presence of biased noise.
The award, established in 2015 by the APS Division on Quantum Information (formally known as the APS Topical Group on Quantum Information), and partially endowed by the International Business Machines Corporation, honors Landauer’s and Bennett’s pioneering work for foundational discoveries between information and physics.
Rolf Landauer made many contributions to the understanding of the relationship between thermodynamics and information, the most well‐known being Landauer’s principle that states the minimal energy required to erase a bit is kT ln(2). Landauer was a fellow of the APS and a winner of the Oliver Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize.
Charles Bennett is one of the founders of the field of quantum information and computation. Bennett is a fellow of the APS and his citation reads “for inventing reversible computation, for his analysis of Maxwell’s demon, and for co‐inventing quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation.” Quantum teleportation is a key primitive in quantum computation and plays a significant role in current methods for quantum error correction and universal quantum computation. Bennett’s work helped establish quantum information science as a coherent discipline, one that illuminates other areas of physics and has important practical applications.