Quantum Computing with Neutral Atoms in Optical Lattices

Kathy-Anne Brickman Soderberg
The University of Chicago

Atoms confined in optical lattices are a promising system for quantum information processing due to the high level of control available over both the external and internal degrees of freedom. One can tailor the confining potential through control of the trapping laser beams’ intensity and geometry, induce strong contact interactions between atoms, and manipulate the internal states through microwave and optical fields. In this talk, I will present a novel experimental approach to quantum computing with atoms trapped in optical lattices. Two different atomic species are each held in an independent optical lattice. One lattice holds exactly one atom per site and is used for storage. These atoms are the quantum bits (qubits) in the system. The second lattice is more sparsely filled with one atom per every 100 sites, on average. These atoms act as messengers to both aid in individual addressing of the qubits and mediate entangling operations between qubits. Neutral atoms in optical lattices lend themselves to scalability because thousands of qubits can be held in regular micron sized volume arrays. This scheme is also scalable in the sense that the messenger atoms can operate on any qubit, therefore any two distant qubits can be entangled and not just nearest neighbor pairs. This is achieved by translating the lattices with respect to each other to bring the messenger atom into contact with the different target qubit atoms.