David P. DiVincenzo was born in 1959. He is an American scientist who studies theories in physics. He is the head of the Institute of Theoretical Nanoelectronics at the Peter Grünberg Institute, which is part of Forschungszentrum Jülich. He also teaches at the Institute for Quantum Information at RWTH Aachen University. In 1997, he worked with Daniel Loss, a scientist at the University of Basel, to create a design for a quantum computer. Their idea, called the Loss–DiVincenzo quantum computer, would use the movement and rotation of electrons in tiny structures called quantum dots to store and process information as qubits.

Career

In 1996, during his research at IBM, he published a paper titled "Topics in Quantum Computing." This paper listed five basic requirements he believed were essential for building a quantum computer. These requirements are now called the "DiVincenzo criteria" and have greatly influenced research on creating functional quantum computers.

The DiVincenzo criteria for a quantum computer are:

• A system that can grow and has qubits that are well understood.
• The ability to set the state of qubits to a simple starting state, such as |000⋯⟩.
• A complete set of operations that can perform any quantum calculation.
• Decoherence times must be long enough to allow operations to complete.
• The ability to measure each qubit individually.

For quantum communication, which involves sending intact qubits from one place to another, two additional requirements are needed:

• The ability to convert qubits that stay in one place to those that can move.
• The ability to send moving qubits between distant locations.