Congrats to the two winners of the first Best Student Paper Awards for the APS Topical Group on Quantum Information, Concepts and Computation: Michael Garrett (Calgary) and Chris Langer (NIST, Boulder) (What you’ve already seen this announcement, congrats! What you’ve not seen this announcement? Must be because your not a member of the topical group. Maybe you should join? Then again who am I to say what you should do!) The awards are sponsored by the Perimeter Institute (theory) and the Institute for Quantum Computing (experiment) and come with a $500 award, but more importantly with fabulous fame! (Hey no jokes about the “American Physical Society” awards in quantum computing both being sponsered by Canadian institutions.)
Here is the abstract from Michael Garrett’s talk:
9:36AM U40.00007 Stochastic One-Way Quantum Computing with Ultracold Atoms in Optical
Lattices , MICHAEL C. GARRETT, University of Calgary, DAVID L. FEDER, University of Calgary — The one-way model of quantum computation has the advantage over conventional approaches of allowing all entanglement to be prepared in a single initial step prior to any logical operations, generating the so-called cluster state. One of the most promising experimental approaches to the formation of such a highly entangled resource employs a gas of ultracold atoms confined in an optical lattice. Starting with a Mott insulator state of pseudospin-1/2 bosons at unit filling, an Ising-type interaction can be induced by allowing weak nearest-neighbor tunneling, resulting in the formation of a cluster state. An alternate approach is to prepare each spin state in its own sublattice, and induce collisional phase shifts by varying the laser polarizations. In either case, however, there is a systematic phase error which is likely to arise, resulting in the formation of imperfect cluster states. We will present various approaches to one-way quantum computation using imperfect cluster states, and show that the algorithms are necessarily stochastic if the error syndrome is not known.
and here is the abstract from Chris Langer’s talk
8:48AM U40.00003 Robust quantum memory using magnetic-field-independent atomic qubits1, C. LANGER, R. OZERI, J. D. JOST, B. DEMARCO2, A. BEN-KISH3, B. BLAKESTAD, J. BRITTON, J. CHIAVERINI, D. B. HUME, W. M. ITANO, D. LEIBFRIED, R. REICHLE, T. ROSENBAND, P. SCHMIDT, D. J. WINELAND — Scalable quantum information processing requires physical systems capable of reliably storing coherent superpositions for times over which quantum error correction can be implemented. We experimentally demonstrate a robust quantum memory using a magnetic-field-independent hyperfine transition in 9Be+ atomic ion qubits at a field B = 0.01194 T. Qubit superpositions are created and analyzed with two-photon stimulated-Raman transitions. We observe the single physical qubit memory coherence time to be greater than 10 seconds, an improvement of approximately five orders of magnitude from previous experiments. The probability of memory error for this qubit during the measurement period (the longest timescale in our system) is approximately 1.4 × 10−5 which is below fault-tolerance threshold for common quantum error correcting codes.