Edward Farhi

As a graduate student, Farhi introduced the jet variable thrust.^[3] He later worked with Leonard Susskind on grand unified theories with electro-weak dynamical symmetry breaking and with Larry Abbott at CERN on models in which quarks, leptons, and massive gauge bosons are composite.^[4] He and Robert Jaffe formalized a notion of strange matter^[5] and with Charles Alcock and Angela Olinto he studied "strange stars,"^[6] compact objects made of strange matter. Later, he and Alan Guth studied limitations on creating a new inflationary universe in a laboratory.^[7] He and Guth, along with Sean Carroll, gave limitations on the existence of Gott time machines in two spatial dimensions.^[8]

Since the late '90s, Farhi has worked on quantum computing and quantum algorithms. He and Sam Gutmann, who have known each other since high school,^[9] introduced a continuous-time Hamiltonian-based approach to quantum computation.^[10] and proposed the first algorithms based on quantum walks.^[11] Along with Jeffrey Goldstone and Michael Sipser, they introduced an early proposal for adiabatic quantum computation.^[12] In 2007, Farhi, Goldstone, and Gutmann gave a polynomial quantum speedup, using quantum walks, for solving a certain combinatorial game.^[13] In 2010, along with Peter Shor and three others at MIT, he introduced a scheme for quantum money.^[14] In 2014 Farhi, Goldstone, and Gutmann introduced the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) for finding approximate solutions to combinatorial search problems,^[15] which as of 2024 was viewed as a leading candidate to run on contemporary noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.^[16][17] Farhi and Aram Harrow have argued that the lowest depth version of the QAOA could exhibit a form of quantum supremacy.^[18]

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