Quantum Information with Alkaline Earth Atoms

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(Public Law 111-5)资助的。这项工作的学术价值源于开发一种可扩展的、基于中性原子的量子计算和量子模拟的新方法，该方法利用碱土原子中的电子和核自由度。这些原子独特的原子结构不仅使它们成为光学频率标准和时钟技术的理想选择，而且还为量子信息处理提供了新的机会，这些机会仍有待充分开发。在这个项目中，考虑了费米子碱土原子的登记，其中一个(电子)量子比特编码在基单重态-三重态光学跃迁中，附加的量子比特编码在核自旋自由度中。由于电子自由度可以很容易地用激光和其他外场操纵，因此电子量子比特被视为通信量子比特，即用于检测和耦合寄存器的数据总线。另一方面，核量子比特被用作开关来开启和关闭电子相互作用，并存储量子信息。该项目的具体目标包括：(I)开发精确操纵和检测电子和核量子比特的方案，(Ii)利用电子和核的自由度来产生纠缠和实施量子计算协议。这项工作的更广泛影响部分来自教育和宣传方面，包括对研究生和博士后的培训。这些学生还将从与JILA实验小组的互动中受益。研究人员将继续为社区外联计划做出贡献，如公共讲座和可访问的物理文章，并将通过组织研讨会、在审查小组任职和专业委员会成员资格，保持对物理界的重要服务水平。该项目将影响不同的研究领域，因为它包含跨学科科学，涉及应用在精密光谱学(原子、分子和光学物理以及量子光学)中实施的冷碱土系综的独特原子结构，以设计高度可控的装置，一方面能够处理量子信息(量子信息科学)，另一方面产生对强关联多体哈密顿算符(凝聚态和材料科学)的基本见解。这个项目的跨学科特征直接反映在PI本身，因为它为三名主要研究人员(Ana Maria Rey、Murray Holland和Victor Gurarie)寻求支持，他们拥有跨越量子光学、凝聚态和原子物理不同但互补的领域的专业知识。由此产生的兴趣和能力的协同作用将使该小组能够深入研究广泛的问题，而这些问题对于单一的研究人员项目来说是困难的或不可行的。

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.