Sankar Das Sarma, Richard E. Prange Chair in Physics, Distinguished University Professor, Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute, and Director of the Condensed Matter Theory Center was included on Thomson Reuter’s 2015 list of Highly Cited Researchers, a compilation of influential names in science.

Das Sarma’s research interests include condensed matter physics, statistical mechanics, and quantum information. A theoretical condensed matter physicist, Das Sarma has worked in the areas of strongly correlated materials, graphene, semiconductor physics, low-dimensional systems, topological matter, quantum Hall effect, nanoscience, spintronics, collective properties of ultra-cold atomic and molecular systems, optical lattice, many-body theory, Majorana fermion, and quantum computation. In 2005, Das Sarma, with colleagues Chetan Nayak and Michael Freedman of Microsoft Research, introduced the nu=5/2 topological qubit that led to experiments in building a fault-tolerant quantum computer based on two-dimensional semiconductor structures.

Das Sarma, a physics faculty member at UMD since 1980, received his undergraduate degree in physics in 1973 from Presidency College in Kolkata, India and his Ph.D. in theoretical condensed physics in 1979 from Brown University.

The Highly Cited Researchers list features 3,126 authors from 21 science disciplines whose published work in their specialty areas has consistently been judged by their peers to be of particular use and significance. These researchers earned the distinction by writing the greatest numbers of reports officially designated by Essential Science Indicators as Highly Cited Papers—ranking among the top 1 percent most cited for their subject field and year of publication. The 2015 Highly Cited Researchers list incorporates all of the feedback received between September 8, 2015 and December 1, 2015.

The Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers list is one of several criteria used by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University to determine the Academic Ranking of World Universities.

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The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) invests in high-risk, high-payoff research programs to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in the intelligence community. One of these challenges is dealing with encryption. Codes considered unbreakable by today’s best supercomputers could be handled in a matter of hours by quantum computers.

The basic building blocks of a quantum device are qubits. These are the quantum mechanical analogue of a traditional logical bit, which can be in a “1” or a “0” state. Quantum physics allows for qubits to take on multiple configurations simultaneously (e.g. an equally-weighted superposition of 0 and 1), which is forbidden in conventional computing. When scientists in the 1990s proved that this strange property could be harnessed for solving certain tasks, such as decryption, the quantum information revolution began.

While researchers have proven that robust qubits can be built, scaling them into large networks while detecting and correcting errors remains a challenge.

IARPA awarded the Duke/Maryland/Georgia Tech partnership a five-year, $31.9 million grant through its program dubbed LogiQ. Their goal is to bring together a large number of atomic qubits to realize modular “super-qubits” that can be scaled up while correcting for errors. This major multi-year award is led by Jungsang Kim (Duke University), Christopher Monroe (University of Maryland and the Joint Quantum Institute) and Ken Brown (Georgia Tech).

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