Daniel Loss

Daniel Loss is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is a pioneer and world leader of spin qubits and quantum computing. He received Diploma (1983) and Ph.D. (1985) in theoretical physics at the University of Zürich. 1989-1991 he worked as a postdoc with Nobel Laureate A. J. Leggett in Urbana, and 1991-1993 at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, NY. In 1993 he joined the faculty of SFU in Vancouver, and then returned to Switzerland in 1996 to become Full Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Basel where he founded the Basel Center for Quantum Computing and Quantum Coherence (QC2) in 2005. Research interests include spin physics, spin qubits, quantum dots, semiconductors, quantum coherence, topological effects in semiconducting and magnetic nanostructures, and quantum computing. His publication record has over 62’000 citations with h-index 113. In 2000 he became APS Fellow, 2013 Member of the European Academy of Sciences, 2014 Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and 2021 External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society. 2005 he received the Humboldt Research Prize, 2010 the Marcel Benoist Prize (highest award by the Swiss government), 2014 the Blaise Pascal Medal in Physics from the European Academy of Sciences, and 2017 the King Faisal International Prize in Science. He is co-director of the Swiss national center on spin-based quantum computing in semiconductors, a field he pioneered in a series of publications starting in 1998 with his seminal work on spin qubits in quantum dots (with D. DiVincenzo). Their visionary paper led to an entirely new field and is one of the highest cited research papers in quantum computing.