Honorary Fellow awarded Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Visiting Professor at the Department of Physics at Oxford and Honorary Fellow at Wolfson Professor David Deutsch, has today been named as one of four international pioneering physicists to receive the 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Now in their 11th year, the Breakthrough Prizes are renowned as the ‘Oscars of Science,’ and were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. The world’s largest science awards, each is worth $3 million and recognises the top scientists in the fields of Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics.

Professor Deutsch is described by the awards as laying the foundations of quantum computation. He defined the quantum version of a Turing machine – a universal quantum computer, and proved that it could simulate to arbitrary accuracy any physical system that obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. He showed that such a computer is equivalent to a network of surprisingly few quantum gates – logic gates that leverage entanglement and the quantum superposition of many states at once. And he designed the first quantum algorithm that surpasses the best equivalent classical algorithm.

Professor Deutsch commented, ‘I am so pleased that this field is being recognised as not just providing a new mode of computation and a new technology, but a new mode of explanation and understanding of the physical world.’

He shares this year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Charles H Bennett from IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center, Gilles Brassard from the Université de Montréal, and Peter Shor from MIT.

Speaking about today’s prizes, Breakthrough Prize Founder Yuri Milner said, ‘The laureates honored today embody the remarkable power of fundamental science both to reveal deep truths about the Universe, and to improve human lives.’