Leo Kouwenhoven

Leo Kouwenhoven (born (1963-12-10)10 December 1963) is a Dutch physicist known for his research on quantum computing.

Kouwenhoven grew up in Pijnacker, a village near Delft, where his parents ran a farm. After losing the admission lottery for veterinary medicine he decided to study physics at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).[1]

In 1992 he received his PhD cum laude at TU Delft; his promoter was Hans Mooij. In 1999 he became a professor at TU Delft.[1] In 2007 he received the Spinoza Prize, the highest Dutch academic award. In April 2012 his TU Delft research group presented experimental results that provided potential "signatures" of Majorana fermion quasiparticles.[2][3][4] These Majorana quasiparticles would be very stable, and therefore suitable for building a quantum computer.[5]

In 2018 his research group claimed to have proved the definitive existence of Majorana particles in a Nature publication.[6] However, the results could not be reproduced by other scientists, and the article had to be retracted in 2021 due to "insufficient scientific rigour".[7] [8][9][10] The researchers had excluded data points that contradicted their claims, with the complete data not supporting their conclusions.[11]