QUIE2T Quantum Information Entanglement-Enabled Technologies

 - Quantum key distribution with continuous variables: theoretical and experimental work on long-distance system performance and side channel induced attacks

- Quantum cryptographic primitives: theoretical and experimental work on secret sharing, coin flipping, entanglement verification in the presence of adversaries

- Theory of Quantum Computation and Quantum Information including measurement-based quantum computing, entanglement theory and foundations of physics

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.

On the 4th of February 2011 the European Commission has sent us the official approval to our request to add Basel Universität (UNIBAS) among the AQUTE partners, following the move of Professor Philipp Treutlein from München (LMU, AQUTE partner P11) to Basel.

We introduce a protocol to drive many body quantum systems into long-lived entangled states, protected from decoherence by big energy gaps. With this approach it is possible to implement scalable entanglement-storage units. We test the protocol in the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model, a prototype many-body quantum system that describes different experimental setups.

We introduce an algorithm to perform an optimal adiabatic evolution that operates without an apriori knowledge of the system spectrum. By probing the system gap locally, the algorithm maximizes the evolution speed, thus minimizing the total evolution time. We test the algorithm on the Landau-Zener transition and then apply it on the quantum adiabatic computation of 3-SAT: The result is compatible with an exponential speed-up for up to twenty qubits with respect to classical algorithms. We finally study a possible algorithm improvement by combining it with the quantum Zeno effect.

We review quantum information processing with cold neutral particles, that is, atoms or polar molecules. First, we analyze the best suited degrees of freedom of these particles for storing quantum information, and then we discuss both single- and two-qubit gate implementations. We focus our discussion mainly on collisional quantum gates, which are best suited for atom-chip-like devices, as well as on gate proposals conceived for optical lattices.

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.

Optimal control theory is a versatile tool that presents a route to significantly improving figures of merit for quantum information tasks. We combine it here with the geometric theory for local equivalence classes of two-qubit operations to derive an optimization algorithm that determines the best entangling two-qubit gate for a given physical setting. We demonstrate the power of this approach for trapped polar molecules and neutral atoms.

We study controlled phasegates for ultracold atoms in an optical potential. A shaped laser pulse drives transitions between the ground and electronically excited states where the atoms are subject to a long-range 1/R3 interaction. We fully account for this interaction and use optimal control theory to calculate the pulse shapes. This allows us to determine the minimum pulse duration, respectively, gate time T that is required to obtain high fidelity.

This highlight contains a small video and the accompanying poster displaying what is know as the AQUTE Flagchip, the wondrous box containing the state-of-the-art atomic chips that has been displayed in several ICT events (the last one having been ICT 2010 Digitally Driven in Brussels). Enjoy!