Education

MSc Physics

Uppsala University

PhD Physics

Uppsala University

Honours

• Reward for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research, University of California, Davis - 2007
• Charles Kittel Award, American Physical Society - 2006
• Angstrom Premium for Excellence in Research, Uppsala University - 2004

Publications

Intrinsic quantum computation (2008)
J. P. Crutchfield, K. Wiesner
Phys. Lett. A vol: 372 , Issue: 4 , Pages: 375 - 380
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physleta.2007.07.052
URL provided by the author

Computation in Finitary Stochastic and Quantum Processes (2008)
K. Wiesner, J. P. Crutchfield
Physica D
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physd.2008.01.021
URL provided by the author

Full list of publications

Research Interests

I like to summarize my research as follows.

Nature stores and processes information - it computes. Scientists have successfully described various physical processes as a computation - among others: Electronic excitations, molecular self-assembly, DNA transcription. Some of these are quantum, others are classical computations. How can we find the correct computation-theoretic model in general? When is nature a classical and when a quantum computer? I develop quantum computation-theoretic models of physical systems to answer this question. Turning the question on its head I ask "How do physical systems, that are described by different computation-theoretic models, differ in their physical structure". I suggest that we can learn about the hierarchical structure that connects physics, chemistry, and biology from looking at computational capacity.

Research Themes

• Complex Systems
• Quantum Information