Edward Henry Farhi (born June 26, 1952[1]) is a physicist working on quantum computation as a principal scientist at Google.
[citation needed] Farhi was trained as a theoretical particle physicist but has also worked on astrophysics, general relativity, and the foundations of quantum mechanics.
As a graduate student, Farhi invented the jet variable "Thrust" which is used today at the Large Hadron Collider to describe how particles in high energy accelerator collisions come out in collimated streams.
His interest then shifted to general relativity and he and Alan Guth studied the classical and quantum prospects of creating a new inflationary universe in a laboratory.
[7] Since the late '90s, Farhi has been studying how to use quantum mechanics to gain algorithmic speedup in solving problems that are difficult for conventional computers.
He and Sam Gutmann pioneered the continuous time Hamiltonian based approach to quantum computation [8] which is an alternative to the conventional gate model.