Wesley Campbell, Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland

Topic: "Quantum Information Processing with Ultrafast Pulses and Trapped Ions"  (Video)

Abstract: Quantum many-body systems with tens or hundreds of particles are often intractable to simulate on classical computers due to the exponential growth of the Hilbert space with the number of particles. One can nonetheless hope to simulate them efficiently by using another quantum system—one that also shows this exponential scaling but is initializable, well controlled, and easy to manipulate and probe. We use a collection of trapped atomic ions as a platform for the quantum simulation of lattices of spin 1/2 particles. I will discuss the use of picosecond mode-locked lasers to drive stimulated Raman transitions and create the state-dependent potentials that simulate a variety of spin-spin interactions between lattice sites. By extracting a single ultrafast laser pulse, we can also realize ultrafast gates that drive a high-fidelity single-qubit gate in ~50 ps and entangle a trapped atom qubit with its motion in ~15 ns. These advances move us closer to the goal of scaling up the number of qubits in the quantum processor / simulator and to outperforming a classical computer.