Daniel Loss is a Swiss theoretical physicist and a professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Basel and RIKEN. In 1997, he worked with David P. DiVincenzo at IBM Research to develop the Loss-DiVincenzo quantum computer, which uses electron spins in quantum dots as qubits.
Daniel Loss was born in 1958 in Winterthur, Switzerland. He studied medicine at the University of Zurich for two years before switching to physics. In 1985, he earned his PhD in physics from the University of Zurich, completing a thesis on statistical mechanics under the guidance of A. Thellung. After postdoctoral work in Zurich and at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where he studied with Anthony Leggett, he became a research scientist at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. In 1993, he joined Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, as a professor. Since 1996, he has been a full professor at the University of Basel.
Loss’s research focuses on quantum theory related to condensed-matter and solid-state physics. He studies spin and charge effects in semiconductor and magnetic nanostructures. He is a leading expert on using semiconductor structures to develop protocols for quantum information processing. His 1998 paper, co-authored with David DiVincenzo, proposed using spin qubits in semiconductor quantum dots. This work is a key foundation for one of the main methods to build a quantum computer. As of 2025, this paper has been cited more than 9,000 times. Other research areas include decoherence, nuclear spin physics, magnon physics, topological matter, Majorana fermions, and parafermions.
Selected honors and awards
- 2000: Became a Fellow of the American Physical Society
- 2005: Became a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, UK
- 2005: Received the Humboldt Research Prize
- 2010: Received the Marcel Benoist Prize
- 2014: Received the Blaise Pascal Medal in Physics from the European Academy of Sciences
- 2014: Became a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
- 2017: Received the King Faisal International Prize in Science (Physics)
- 2021: Became an external scientific member of the Max Planck Society
- 2024: Received the Jan Czochralski Award
- 2025: Named Clarivate Citation Laureates in Physics