Steven Girvin

Steven Mark Girvin is an American physicist who is Sterling Professor and former Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale University. He is noted for his theoretical work on quantum many body systems such as the fractional quantum Hall effect, and as co-developer of circuit quantum electrodynamics (circuit QED), the application of the ideas of quantum optics to superconducting microwave circuits. Circuit QED is now the leading architecture for construction of quantum computers based on superconducting qubits.

Early life and education
Steven Girvin was born in Austin, Texas, on April 5, 1950, and attended high school in Brant Lake, New York, graduating with a class of five students. Girvin attended Bates College and received a B.S. degree in physics in 1971. He also received an M.S. from the University of Maine in 1973.

Girvin later completed postgraduate studies at Princeton University, receiving an M.S. in 1974 and an Ph.D. in 1977. His doctoral thesis, published in 1976, is entitled Topics in Condensed Matter Physics: The Role of Exchange in the Lithium K Edge and the Fluorescence Spectrum of Heavily Doped Cadmium Sulphide and was completed under the supervision of J. J. Hopfield.

Career
From 1977 to 1979, Girvin worked as a postdoctoral researcher at both Indiana University Bloomington and Chalmers University of Technology, under the advising of G. D. Mahan. Girvin then held a physicist position at the National Bureau of Standards from 1979 to 1987 and a professorship at Indiana University from 1987 to 2001 before joining Yale in 2001.

Girvin's research focus has been theoretical study of collective quantum behavior in strongly correlated many body systems and their phase transitions; he has worked on problems such as the quantum Hall effect, the superconductor–insulator transition, and quantum spin chains. He works with experimentalists Robert Schoelkopf and Michel Devoret on the engineering problem of building a quantum computer, and on developing "circuit QED" using superconducting electrical circuits. The group experimentally implemented the first all-electronic quantum processor and executed two-qubit quantum algorithms in 2009. Girvin co-edited the book The Quantum Hall Effect, which has been translated into Japanese, Chinese and Russian. Together with co-author Kun Yang, Girvin published the Cambridge Press textbook Modern Condensed Matter Physics in 2019.

Girvin, James P. Eisenstein and Allan H. MacDonald won the 2007 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize for their "Fundamental experimental and theoretical research on correlated many-electron states in low dimensional systems".

In September 2020, Girvin was appointed as the founding director of the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA) located at Brookhaven National Laboratory, one of five national quantum information science research centers funded by the Department of Energy. C2QA comprises 88 principal investigators across 24 institutions who "do the basic research needed to make dramatic advances in the performance of quantum computer modules".

In June 2024, Girvin, who was then Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, became Sterling Professor of Physics. He holds appointments both as a professor of physics and as a professor of applied physics in the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science.

Honors

 * Hedersdoktor (Honoris Causus Doctorate), Chalmers University of Technology (2017)
 * Shared the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (2007)
 * Foreign Associate of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2007)
 * Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2007)
 * Member of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences (2007)
 * Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2006)
 * Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2004)
 * Fellow of the American Physical Society (1989)