QUROPE Quantum Information Processing and Communication in Europe

The control of quantum systems is of fundamental scientific interest and promises powerful applications and technologies. Impressive progress has been achieved in isolating quantum systems from the environment and coherently controlling their dynamics, as demonstrated by the creation and manipulation of entanglement in various physical systems. However, for open quantum systems, engineering the dynamics of many particles by a controlled coupling to an environment remains largely unexplored.

The generation of entanglement between two oscillators that interact via a common reservoir is theoretically studied. The reservoir is modeled by a one-dimensional harmonic crystal initially in thermal equilibrium. Starting from a separable state, the oscillators can become entangled after a transient time, that is of the order of the thermalization time scale. This behavior is observed at finite temperature even when the oscillators are at a distance significantly larger than the crystal's interparticle spacing.

In large ensembles of identical atoms or spins, the interaction with a mode of the electromagnetic radiation field concentrates in a single superradiant degree of freedom with a collectively enhanced coupling. Given a controllable inhomogeneous broadening, such ensembles may be used for multi-mode storage of quantum states of the radiation field with applications in quantum communication networks and quantum computers.

Fermionic alkaline-earth atoms have unique properties that make them attractive candidates for the realization of atomic clocks and degenerate quantum gases. At the same time, they are attracting considerable theoretical attention in the context of quantum information processing. Here we demonstrate that when such atoms are loaded in optical lattices, they can be used as quantum simulators of unique many-body phenomena.

Recent experimental progress with Alkaline-Earth atoms has opened the door to quantum computing schemes in which qubits are encoded in long-lived nuclear spin states, and the metastable electronic states of these species are used for manipulation and readout of the qubits. Here we discuss a variant of these schemes, in which gate operations are performed in nuclear-spin-dependent optical lattices, formed by near-resonant coupling to the metastable excited state. This provides an alternative to a previous scheme [A. J. Daley, M. M. Boyd, J. Ye, and P. Zoller, Phys. Rev.

Ultracold atoms in optical lattices provide a versatile tool with which to investigate fundamental properties of quantum many-body systems. In particular, the high degree of control of experimental parameters has allowed the study of many interesting phenomena, such as quantum phase transitions and quantum spin dynamics. Here we demonstrate how such control can be implemented at the most fundamental level of a single spin at a specific site of an optical lattice.