David Wineland

A physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, who spent decades learning to hold single atoms still and talk to them with light.

His group developed laser cooling of trapped ions to their lowest motional states and, in 1995, with Chris Monroe and colleagues, demonstrated the first quantum logic gate on trapped ions, a CNOT following the Cirac–Zoller proposal. The same precision made possible the best atomic clocks in the world.

He shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics with Serge Haroche for methods of measuring and manipulating individual quantum systems. Today's trapped-ion computers, built by companies such as Quantinuum and IonQ, descend from this laboratory craft; they offer the highest gate fidelities of any platform, at the cost of slower speeds and harder scaling.