Thomas Hammerschmidt from the Atomistic Modelling and Simulation completed his habilitation at the faculty of physics and astronomy today. His habilitation talk was dedicated to basic physical principles of quantum computing. Thomas Hammerschmidt studied physics at TU München and obtained his PhD at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society at Berlin, and was a PostDoc at the University of Oxford, U.K. Since 2008 he leads the ICAMS research group Atomistic Simulation of Structural and Phase Stability.