Liebrandt Abstract

Dave Leibrandt

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Title:

"Progress towards large-scale trapped ion quantum information processing:ion chips, motional decoherence, and optical cavities"

Abstract:

Quantum information processing is a new and exciting field which combines quantum mechanics with computer science. At the heart of the excitement are quantum computation, which promises efficient algorithms for simulating physical systems, factoring, and searching unsorted databases, and quantum communication, which provides a provably secure communications channel.

Trapped ions show much promise for achieving large-scale quantum information processing. The architecture uses electronic or nuclear states of ions trapped in a RF Paul trap to store information and laser-ion interactions to accomplish initialization, logic gates, and readout. Experiments thus far have demonstrated small algorithms and entanglement of two remote ions. The current challenge for trapped ion quantum information processing is integration and scaling to large numbers of quantum bits.

This talk will present recent progress in technology development for large-scale quantum information processing. The first part will focus on the development of microfabricated ion trap chips, the second part will focus on understanding and suppression of trapped ion motional decoherence, and the final part will examine the use of optical cavities for trapped ion quantum information processing.