NWO has announced that our Director Research Lieven Vandersypen is awarded the NWO Spinoza Prize. The Spinoza Prize is the highest award in Dutch Science. Each laureate receives 2.5 million euros, which they can spend on scientific research and activities related to knowledge utilisation.

During his doctoral research, Lieven Vandersypen (1972) already realized a world-wide first: he used the so-called spins of atomic nuclei in molecules as quantum bits, or qubits, the building blocks of a quantum computer. Using seven qubits, he was able to break down the number 15 into the factors 3 and 5, thus demonstrating that making calculations with qubits is not only possible in theory, but also in practice.

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