Chetan Nayak

Chetan Nayak (born 1971) is an Indian-American physicist and computer scientist specializing in quantum computing. He is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a technical fellow and distinguished engineer on the Microsoft Azure Quantum hardware team.^[4] He joined Microsoft in 2005 and became director and general manager of Quantum Hardware at Microsoft Station Q at Microsoft Research in 2014.^[5][6][7]

Chetan Nayak
Born	New York City, NY, United States
Alma mater	Princeton University Harvard University Stuyvesant High School
Awards	APS Fellow (2011)[1] Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship [2] NSF Early Career Award Outstanding Young Physicist Award
Scientific career
Fields	Quantum computing, Computer Science
Institutions	Microsoft
Thesis	Theories of the half-filled Landau level [3]  (1996)
Doctoral advisor	Frank Wilczek [3]

Education and career

Nayak was born in New York City in 1971. He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1992 and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1996.^[5][3] His dissertation on "Theories of the half-filled Landau level" was completed under Frank Wilczek.^[3]

In 1996, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Berkeley (UCSB) and a professor of physics at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1997 to 2006.^[5][8][9]

He joined Microsoft in 2005 as a visiting researcher in Redmond, Washington, and the faculty of UCSB in 2007 where he has served as a technical fellow and professor of condensed matter theory through 2024.^{[5][7][10][11]}

Nayak has contributed to the theory of topological phases, high-temperature superconductivity, the quantum Hall effect, and phases of periodically driven quantum systems.^{[12][13][14][15][16][11][17][18]}

Scientific work

In 1996, Nayak and Wilczek discovered the type of non-Abelian statistics in paired quantum Hall states associated with Majorana zero modes.^[16]

In 2005, with Michael Freedman and Sankar Das Sarma, Nayak authored a proposal for a topological qubit using the 5/2 fractional quantum Hall state as the non-Abelian topological state.^[14][19] In 2006 and 2008, Das Sarma, Freedman and Nayak developed theoretical proposals for topological quantum computing based on non-abelian anyons.^[17][11]

In 2011, Nayak, Parsa Bonderson and Victor Gurarie proved that quasiparticles in certain quantized Hall states are non-Abelian anyons, firmly establishing the mathematical foundation of these particles.^[12]

In 2016, with Dominic Else and Bela Bauer, he developed Floquet time crystals and predicted its occurrence in periodically driven systems.^[15][18]

Nayak also led research teams in inducing a phase of matter characterized by Majorana zero modes with low enough disorder to pass the topological gap protocol, demonstrating the viability of topological quantum computing. ^[20]

In February 2025, the Microsoft Quantum team announced the creation of a chip powered by a topological architecture.^[21] The claim has been met with skepticism by many in the quantum scientific and engineering community, who question the lack of data supporting the existence of the proposed qubits.^[22][23] Nayak has clarified that the supporting data, namely measurements on the native operations in a measurement-based topological qubit, do exist. Results were presented to a closed group at a Station Q meeting and are anticipated at the 2025 APS March Meeting.^[24]

Recognition

Nayak is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a recipient of the Outstanding Young Physicist Award from the American Chapter of the Indian Physics Association, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and an NSF Early Career Award.^{[1][2][25][26]}