Matthias Troyer (born 1968) is an Austrian physicist and computer scientist who works in the field of quantum computing. He is also a Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President of Quantum at Microsoft.

Education and career

Troyer was born on April 18, 1968, in Linz, Austria. He earned a degree in Technical Physics from the Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Austria, in 1991. He also completed a diploma in Physics and a PhD thesis in an interdisciplinary field at the ETH Zürich, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, in 1994.

His PhD research, titled "Simulation of Constrained Fermions in Low-Dimensional Systems," was completed under the guidance of Diethelm Wurtz and Thomas Maurice Rice. He received the ETH medal for completing an outstanding doctoral thesis.

After earning his PhD, he worked for three years as a fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Sciences at the Institute for Solid State Physics. In 2000, he was awarded an assistant professorship by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

In June 2002, he became an associate professor at ETH Zurich. In 2005, he was promoted to Full Professor of Computational Physics before joining Microsoft’s quantum computing program in 2017. He is also an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington.

He started the open-source project ALPS (Algorithms and Libraries for Physics Simulations) to help scientists access tools for studying many-body systems.

Troyer creates practical algorithms and applications for quantum computing using high-performance computing. His work includes designing libraries, simulating quantum devices, chemical reactions, neural networks, and artificial intelligence. He also studies simulation methods for quantum many-body systems, quantum phase transitions, strongly correlated materials, and ultracold quantum gases.

Honors and awards

In 2019, Troyer received the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics.

In 2015, he was awarded the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics by the American Physical Society. This honor recognized his important work in difficult areas of the quantum mechanical many-body problem and for creating advanced computer programs that help scientists.

Troyer has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2011.

He is also the president of the Aspen Center for Physics and has been a member since 2004. He serves as a board member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences. Troyer won the gold medal at the International Chemistry Olympiad in 1986 and the silver medal in 1985.

Selected work

• Matthias Troyer and Uwe-Jens Wiese. "The difficulty of simulating fermions using computers and their limits." Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 170201 (2005).
• Philipp Werner, Armin Comanac, Luca de' Medici, Matthias Troyer, and Andrew J. Millis. "A method for solving quantum impurity models using continuous time." Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 076405 (2006).
• Emanuel Gull, Andrew J. Millis, Alexander I. Lichtenstein, Alexey N. Rubtsov, Matthias Troyer, and Philipp Werner. "Using Monte Carlo methods in continuous time to solve quantum impurity models." Phys. Rev. Mod. Phys. 83, 349 (2011).
• Troels F. Rønnow, Zhihui Wang, Joshua Job, Sergio Boixo, Sergei V. Isakov, David Wecker, John M. Martinis, Daniel A. Lidar, Matthias Troyer. "How to define and identify quantum speedup." Science 345, 420 (2014).
• Bettina Heim, Troels F. Rønnow, Sergei V. Isakov, and Matthias Troyer. "Comparing quantum and classical methods for solving Ising spin glasses." Science 348, 215 (2015).
• A.A. Soluyanov, D. Gresch, Z. Wang, Q.S., Wu, M. Troyer, Xi Dai, and B. A. Bernevig. "A new kind of Weyl semimetal." Nature 527, 495 (2015).
• Giuseppe Carleo, Matthias Troyer. "Using artificial neural networks to solve the quantum many-body problem." Science 355, 580 (2017).
• Giacomo Torlai, Guglielmo Mazzola, Juan Carrasquilla, Matthias Troyer, Roger Melko & Giuseppe Carleo. "Using neural networks for quantum state tomography." Nature Physics 14, 447–450 (2018).
• Torsten Hoefler, Thomas Häner, and Matthias Troyer. "Separating hype from reality in achieving quantum advantage." Communications of the ACM 66, 5, 82-87 (2023).