Nike Dattani


Nike Dattani is a scientist known for breaking the world-record for largest number factored on a quantum device in 2014. He is also known for co-inventing the Morse/Long-range potential energy function, and for inventing several novel methods for quadratization of high-degree discrete optimization problems into quadratic problems which are much easier to solve.

Selected work

Integer factorization and discrete optimization

In 2014, Dattani wrote an article with his colleague Nathan Bryans, in which they were regarded as having broken the record for the "largest number factored on a quantum device". The ability to factor larger numbers in non-classical ways forced the NSA to begin working on stronger security schemes, and his first article on the subject was referenced in the article, "NSA prepares for a post-quantum world." Ronald Rivest of the RSA cryptosystem mentioned his work in a talk on the threats of quantum computing against classical security schemes. He has made numerous contributions to the field of discrete optimization itself and to the embedding of discrete optimization problems onto quantum annealing hardware, including the first decoding of D-Wave's Pegasus architecture.

Morse/long-range potential

Several years before working on integer factorization, he invented the Morse/Long-range potential with Robert J. LeRoy and John A. Coxon, which has been used by other scientists for over 20 different molecules in over 80 publications. His work using the MLR potential was referred to as a "landmark in diatomic spectral analysis" in Ref. In the landmark work, the C3 value for atomic lithium was determined to a higher-precision than any atom's previously measured oscillator strength, by an order of magnitude. This lithium oscillator strength is related to the radiative lifetime of atomic lithium and is used as a benchmark for atomic clocks and measurements of fundamental constants.

Other notable work

At the Institute for Quantum Computing he worked with Raymond Laflamme on the three-slit experiment, an extension of the famous two-slit experiment by Thomas Young.
Dattani's early studies were in biology, and eventually his work with David Wilkins on the Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex ended about one decade of debate about the question of the functional role of quantum coherence in bacterial photosynthesis.
His other work includes deriving novel Quantum master equations, and founding the Gravity in Spectroscopy project hosted at Harvard University.

Public engagement

In 2012, he was voted as the runner-up in I'm a Scientist, Get me out of here!
While in Kyoto, Japan in 2014, he gave a PechaKucha talk on using art to study genetics for Volume 15 of PechaKucha Night Kyoto and was subsequently interviewed by Ash Ryan and Eric Luong of the PechaKucha foundation in a podcast.

Selected books