Alexei Kitaev

Who is Alexei Kitaev?

Alexei Kitaev is a Russian–American professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is best known for introducing the quantum phase estimation algorithm and the concept of the topological quantum computer while working at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. For this work, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008. He is also known for introducing the complexity class QMA and showing that some local Hamiltonian problems are QMA-complete.

Kitaev was educated in Russia, receiving an M.Sc from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and a Ph.D from the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He served previously as a researcher at Microsoft Research, a research associate at the Landau Institute and a professor at the California Institute of Technology.