Barbara Terhal

Barbara M. Terhal (born 1969) is a theoretical physicist working in quantum information and quantum computing. She is a researcher at the Forschungszentrum Jülich (Jülich Research Center), a Professor in the EEMCS Department at TU Delft, as well as the Research Lead for the Terhal Group at QUTech. Her research concerns many areas in quantum information theory, including entanglement detection, quantum error correction, fault-tolerant quantum computing and quantum memories.
Education and early life.
Barbara Terhal was born in Leiden, 1969. Already in her early school days, she enjoyed mathematics, physics and solving puzzles.
Terhal completed her PhD Cum Laude on "Quantum Algorithms and Quantum Entanglement" at the University of Amsterdam in 1999, making her the first person to receive a PhD in quantum computing in the Netherlands. As part of her thesis, she coined the term entanglement witness and proposed their use as alternatives to Bell tests for entanglement detection.
Career and research.
After her PhD, Terhal joined the IBM Watson Research Centre in Yorktown Heights, New York and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a postdoctoral researcher. Between 2001 and 2010, she worked at IBM on a number of topics, including low-depth quantum circuits or stoquastic Hamiltonians, perturbative gadgets for quantum simulation and quantum complexity theory. She also developed quantum protocols for remote state preparation, quantum locking and quantum data hiding.
In 2010, Terhal became a professor in theoretical physics at RWTH Aachen University. In addition, she holds another position at the Forschungszentrum Jülich since 2015.
Since 2007, Terhal has been a fellow of the American Physical Society and has held the post of Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada since 2014. She is also a professor at QuTech in Delft since 2017.
Terhal's current research focuses on quantum error correction and its realisation in solid-state qubits. She is also interested in quantum complexity theory and how it can be used to demonstrate the power of a quantum computer.
Awards.
Barbara Terhal has received the following awards:
Publications.
Her publications include:
She has also written an essay on the fragility of quantum information.