Building on Caltech’s leading position in fields such as general relativity, astrophysics, quantum computation, superstring theory, elementary particle theory, and condensed matter theory, the new institute will train generations of theoretical physicists.

Caltech has been awarded $12.6 million in funding over the next five years by the National Science Foundation to create a new Physics Frontiers Center. Dubbed the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM), the center will bring physicists and computer scientists together to push theoretical and experimental boundaries in the study of exotic quantum states.