Quantum Information Processing presents first Howard E. Brandt Best Paper Award

Springer's journal Quantum Information Processing has awarded the first annual Howard E. Brandt Best Paper Award to the most outstanding paper published in the journal during the previous year. The winning paper is "Ultrastrong coupling in a scalable design for circuit QED with superconducting flux qubits" by Mun Dae Kim of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study in Seoul. The award was announced yesterday at the Quantum Information and Computation Conference at the SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing Meeting in Baltimore, MD, USA.

The award commemorates the journal's late editor-in-chief Howard E. Brandt, and carries a prize amount of 500 USD. At the meeting, Quantum Information Processing editor-in-chief Yaakov S. Weinstein of the MITRE Corporation, Princeton, NJ, USA, and Springer publishing editor Sara Kate Heukerott announced the winner and presented copies of the March 2016 special issue "In Memory of Dr. Howard Brandt" to Dr. Brandt's widow and family.

Dr. Weinstein said, "The paper by Mun Dae Kim makes prominent strides towards the realization of quantum computation utilizing superconducting flux qubits. It does this by demonstrating how to increase the effective strength of the coupling between qubits. The Best Paper Award, which is being presented for the first time, honors editor emeritus Dr. Howard Brandt. His insight, persistence and vision sparked the interest of a generation of scientists in quantum information science."

Sara Kate Heukerott said, "It was a pleasure and an honor to work with Howard Brandt, and Springer is delighted to be able to commemorate his legacy to the quantum information community in this way. The winning paper showcases the exciting and cutting-edge research being published in our journal."

Provided by Springer