A University of Maryland physics professor was among 84 new members and 21 foreign associates to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences Tuesday.

University professor Christopher Monroe is the Bice Zorn Professor of Physics, as well as a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute and the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science.

“This is one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive,” physics professor and former physics department chair Jordan Goodman said.

After earning his doctorate in physics, Monroe said he stumbled upon quantum physics while working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s lab in Boulder, Colorado.

“It turned out that very year, 1995, when we got our experiment working … this whole new field, quantum computing, just blossomed,” Monroe said. “We were 10 years ahead of everybody in the world at that moment​.”

Monroe and his colleagues had demonstrations showing how a quantum computer — which makes use of the quantum states of subatomic particles to store information — would work at a very small level. The demonstrations involved quantum computers that are still too small to be useful for anything practical, said Monroe.

While computers use ones and zeros, a quantum computer would use entangled states of quantum bits, or qubits — units of information — instead, Goodman said.

Quantum computers can perform some tasks significantly better than regular computers, but they don’t perform other functions as well, such as running Windows.

A quantum computer, following the laws of quantum physics, would gain enormous processing power such as the ability to factor large numbers about 10,000 times faster than contemporary computers, and perform multiple tasks simultaneously, according to PCMag.org.

A fully functional quantum computer does not yet exist, as much of this research is theoretical, but Monroe said the field has great promise.

The Internet relies on encryption for secure communication and the difficulty to factor large numbers into prime numbers, Goodman said. As these numbers get larger, the computer takes longer to find them, and even the fastest computer could take thousands of years to factor such large numbers. But a quantum computer could do it much faster, he said.

“Quantum mechanics describes everything in the world, but yet you don’t see it normally because it’s well-hidden and it takes a lot of work to isolate systems so that the quantum physics comes out,” university physics professor and co-director of the Joint Quantum Institute Steven Rolston said.

After his time in Colorado, Monroe went to the University of Michigan and started from scratch to continue his research, which was risky, he said, because many others had tried to do this type of research at universities and failed for the most part. He decided to come to this university nine years ago for the research funding the Washington area provides.

“I must say that I can’t imagine doing this research anywhere else but Maryland,” Monroe said. “Not Harvard, not CalTech, not MIT, not Stanford. We’re better than them in this field and because we’re in Washington, the connections are so good.”

Clayton Crocker, an atomic physics graduate student and research assistant who works with Monroe, was glad to see his advisor receive the award.

“It’s great to see national recognition for my advisor,” Crocker said. “He’s a great guy, great researcher and I really feel like he deserves it.”