The "Digital Revolution" that transformed our lives and our economy is based on the ubiquity of information-processing devices whose processing power increased exponentially for many decades, following Moore's law. As this trend is approaching fundamental physical limits, new directions are explored for the design of even more powerful computational devices, such as systems based on quantum mechanics. Such devices can solve problems that will remain out of reach for conventional computers. A specific type of computationally hard problems is the prediction of the evolution of quantum mechanical systems. They can not be simulated efficiently on classical computers, since the computational cost scales exponentially with the size of the system. Quantum computers or specialized quantum simulators can overcome this obstacle, since the scaling properties of suitable quantum algorithms are qualitatively different from those of algorithms designed for classical computers. A specific example is the problem of localization: While ideal quantum systems often have ground states that are delocalized, random perturbations can cause them to become localized, with a sharp phase transition at a specific value of the perturbation strength. This example was demonstrated in an experimental quantum simulator based on nuclear spin qubits.

Dieter Suter received his PhD from ETH Zurich in 1985 for work on the dynamics of nuclear spins in solids. After a postdoctoral position at UC Berekely, he moved into quantum optics at ETH Zurich, where he studied atomic multilevel systems. In 1995, he became a full professor at the University of Dortmund. His current research concentrates on the investigation of structure and dynamics of condensed matter systems by magnetic resonance and high resolution laser spectroscopy, and on quantum information processing.