Quantum Information with Alkaline Earth Atoms

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The intellectual merit of this work stems from the desire to develop a new approach for scalable, neutral atom based, quantum computation and quantum simulation that exploits the electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom in alkaline-earth atoms. The unique atomic structure of these atoms not only has made them ideal for optical frequency standards and clock technology but also offers novel opportunities for quantum information processing which remain to be exploited in full. In this project registers of fermionic alkaline-earth atoms, with one (electronic) qubit encoded in the ground singlet-triplet optical transition and additional qubits encoded in the nuclear spin degrees of freedom are considered. Since the electronic degrees of freedom can easily be manipulated with lasers and other external fields, the electronic qubit are treated as the communication qubit, i.e. the data bus for detecting and coupling the registers. The nuclear qubits, on the other hand, are used as switches to turn on and off the electronic interactions and to store quantum information. Specific goals of the project include; (i) developing schemes for the accurate manipulation and detection of the electronic and nuclear qubits, (ii) exploiting the electron and nuclear degrees of freedom for entanglement generation and the implementation of quantum computation protocols. The broader impacts of this work arises, in part, from the educational and outreach aspects, including the training of graduate students and postdocs. These students will benefit from interacting also with experimental groups at JILA. The investigators will continue to contribute to community outreach programs such as public lectures and accessible physics articles, and will also maintain a significant level of service to the physics community, through organizing workshops, serving on review panels, and memberships on professional committees. This project will impact diverse areas of research since it contains interdisciplinary science involving application of the unique atomic structure of cold alkaline-earth ensembles as implemented for precision spectroscopy (atomic, molecular and optical physics and quantum optics) towards the design of highly-controllable set-ups capable on one hand of processing quantum information (quantum information science) and on the other of generating fundamental insights into strongly correlated manybody Hamiltonians (condensed matter and material science). The interdisciplinary character of this project is directly reflected in the PI's themselves, since it solicits support for three principal investigators (Ana Maria Rey, Murray Holland and Victor Gurarie)with expertise which spans the different but complementary areas of quantum optics, condensed matter, and atomic physics. The resulting synergy of interests and abilities will allow the group to delve into a broad range of problems, which would be difficult or unfeasible for a single investigator program.