Self-introduction: Hidetoshi Nishimori

I am a Professor at the Institute of Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology. I obtained my degrees, BSc, MSc, and DSc, from the Department of Physics of the University of Tokyo. After a stint as a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie-Mellon University and Rutgers University in the United States, I returned to Japan and have been working at Tokyo Institute of Technology, mostly at the Physics Department but I recently moved to the Institute of Innovative Research as the head of the Quantum Computing Research Unit.

My main interest has been the theory of spin glasses, a typical hard problem of equilibrium statistical mechanics, especially exact results derived by using a special type of symmetry. I am recently more interested in quantum annealing, a quantum-mechanical paradigm to solve combinatorial optimization problems, a typical example of which is the ground-state search of spin glasses. This is a very exciting field not just because of the big attention from the society to quantum computing in general, but also due to the very interdisciplinary characteristics of the field in that very basic theoretical results are sometimes immediately implemented in real devices, typically the D-Wave quantum annealer, thus affecting the performance of the device in real-world industrial applications. I hope the stimulating environment of iTHEMS to further broaden the scope my research activities, leading to unexpected developments that are hard to be achieved elsewhere.