QUROPE Quantum Information Processing and Communication in Europe

While solid-state devices offer naturally reliable hardware for modern classical computers, thus far quantum information processors resemble vacuum tube computers in being neither reliable nor scalable. Strongly correlated many body states stabilized in topologically ordered matter offer the possibility of naturally fault tolerant computing, but are both challenging to engineer and coherently control and cannot be easily adapted to different physical platforms.

We present a fault-tolerant (FT) semi-global control strategy for universal quantum computers. We show that an N-dimensional array of qubits where only (N−1)-dimensional addressing resolution is available is compatible with FT universal quantum computation. What is more, we show that measurements and individual control of qubits are required only at the boundaries of the FT computer. Our model alleviates the heavy physical conditions on current qubit candidates imposed by addressability requirements and represents an option for improving their scalability.

We study the single particle dynamics of a mobile non-Abelian anyon hopping around many pinned anyons on a surface, by modeling it with a discrete time quantum walk. During the evolution, the spatial degree of freedom of the mobile anyon becomes entangled with the fusion degrees of freedom of the collective system. Each quantum trajectory makes a closed braid on the world lines of the particles establishing a direct connection between statistical dynamics and quantum link invariants.

We present direct UV-written waveguides and Bragg gratings operating at 780 nm. By combining two gratings into a Fabry-Perot cavity we have devised and implemented a novel and practical method of measuring the group delay of Bragg gratings.

We investigate the use of integrated, microfabricated photonic-atomic junctions for quantum information processing applications. The coupling between atoms and light is enhanced by using microscopic optics without the need for cavity enhancement. Qubits that are collectively encoded in hyperfine states of small ensembles of optically trapped atoms, coupled via the Rydberg blockade mechanism, seem a particularly promising implementation. Fast and high-fidelity gate operations, efficient readout, long coherence times and large numbers of qubits are all possible.

We present a technique for atomic density measurements by the off-resonant phase shift induced on a two-frequency, coherently synthesized light beam. We have used this scheme to measure the column density of a magnetically trapped atom cloud and to monitor oscillations of the cloud in real time by making over a hundred non-destructive local density measurements. For measurements using pulses of 104–105 photons lasting ~10 μs, the precision is limited by statistics of the photons and the photodiode avalanche.

Atom chips are a promising candidate for a scalable architecture for quantum information processing provided a universal set of gates can be implemented with high fidelity. The difficult part in achieving universality is the entangling two-qubit gate. We consider a Rydberg phase gate for two atoms trapped on a chip and employ optimal control theory to find the shortest gate that still yields a reasonable gate error. Our parameters correspond to a situation where the Rydberg blockade regime is not yet reached.

The quantum relative entropy is frequently used as a distance measure between two quantum states, and inequalities relating it to other distance measures are important mathematical tools in many areas of quantum information theory. We have derived many such inequalities in our previous work (K.M.R. Audenaert and J. Eisert, J. Math. Phys. 46, 102104 (2005)). The present paper is a follow-up on this, and provides sharp upper bounds on the relative entropy in terms of the trace norm distance and of the smallest eigenvalues of both states concerned.

Distillation of entanglement using only Gaussian operations is an important primitive in quantum communication, quantum repeater architectures, and distributed quantum computing. Existing distillation protocols for continuous degrees of freedom are only known to converge to a Gaussian state when measurements yield precisely the vacuum outcome. In sharp contrast, non-Gaussian states can be deterministically converted into Gaussian states while preserving their second moments, albeit by usually reducing their degree of entanglement.

We introduce the idea of actually cooling quantum systems by means of incoherent thermal light, hence giving rise to a counter-intuitive mechanism of "cooling by heating". In this effect, the mere incoherent occupation of a quantum mechanical mode serves as a trigger to enhance the coupling between other modes. This notion of effectively rendering states more coherent by driving with incoherent thermal quantum noise is applied here to the opto-mechanical setting, where this effect occurs most naturally.