Alexey Kitaev is one of the brightest physicists of our time. In the late 90s, he left for the States, where he first worked in one of the divisions of Microsoft, and then took up scientific activities at the California Institute of Technology. Kitaev specializes in quantum physics.
Biography: early years
Alexey Yurievich Kitaev was born on August 26, 1963 in Moscow. I got carried away by physics at school thanks to a teacher who loved his subject. Even then, he was especially interested in quantum research. After school, Kitaev entered the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which in Soviet times was the main forge of scientific personnel in the field of physics, mathematics and related disciplines.
After graduating from high school, Alexey continued his education in graduate school at the Institute of Theoretical Physics. Landau. After graduating from it in 1989, he defended his Ph. D. work on the topic "Electronic properties of quasicrystals."
Career and research
After graduate school, the young scientist stayed at the institute as a senior research fellow. Kitaev was engaged in research and taught in parallel. During this time, he studied the behavior of quantum systems and the possibility of their use in practice, in particular in a quantum computer. For this research, after 10 years, he will receive a prestigious scholarship. Kitaev made major contributions to condensed matter physics, including quantum chaos and quasicrystals.
In 1999, Microsoft Corporation became interested in Kitaev's research. This was largely due to the American mathematician Michael Friedman. Soon, the scientist moved to Seattle, where he began working in Research, a division of Microsoft. It specializes in computer science research. There Kitaev worked as a researcher for two years, becoming one of the world's best experts on quantum computing.
In 2002, he continued his research activities at the California Institute of Technology. Six years later, Kitaev was awarded the "Genius Grant" - the so-called MacArthur Scholarship, which is awarded annually to reward young scientists working on unusual projects. Its size in 2008 was 500 thousand dollars. Kitaev received a scholarship for the concept of a quantum computer, which he developed back in 1997 in Russia.
In 2012, he won the Fundamental Physics Prize for the theory of embedding quantum memory and quantum computing using topological phases with unpaired Majorana modes. The latter were first considered by Kitaev.
In 2015, he was awarded the Dirac Medal for the development of error-resistant quantum computers. The award was accompanied by a prize of $ 5,000. Two years later, the physicist's research also received the Oliver Buckley Award.
Personal life
Alexey Kitaev protects his personal life from others. It is known that he has been married for a long time, and he met his wife back in Russia. There is no information about children.
