QUROPE Quantum Information Processing and Communication in Europe

A. Physical approach and perspective

Neutral atoms and molecules provide a promising test bed for the development of scalable general purpose quantum processors, and for quantum simulators as special purpose quantum computers involving a very large number of qubits. As in the case of ions, qubits can be represented by long-lived internal atomic and molecular states in electronic ground states (hyperfine levels, rotational states), or in metastable excited electronic states, which can be manipulated by optical and microwave fields. The unique promises of neutral atom quantum computing rest in particular on the well developed cooling and trapping techniques, as exemplified by laser cooling, realization of Bose Einstein condensates and quantum degenerate Fermi gases, in combination with optical, magnetic and electric traps, realized in free space or in cavities or on atom chips. Such techniques provide an ideal starting point to build and prepare large scale quantum registers with high fidelity. At present these trapping and cooling techniques are being extended to molecules, including, for example, electric on-chip traps for polar molecules. The scenarios of quantum computing with neutral atoms are directly linked to the development of specific trapping techniques. First, traps can be developed allowing the independent manipulation of the centre-of-mass degrees of freedom of individual atoms and molecules, including the addressing of single qubits, which is a necessary requirement for general purpose quantum computing; and massively parallel, identical manipulations of large number of qubits, as realized for example in optical lattices, are relevant in the context of quantum simulators of translation invariant condensed matter systems.

Entanglement of neutral atom or molecule qubits is based on the following physical mechanisms

• Controlled qubit-dependent two-particle interactions, as for example in cold coherent collisions, cavity-assisted collisions, or dipole-dipole interactions between highly excited atomic states (Rydberg states); this kind of approach essentially provide deterministic entanglement and quantum gates;
• Entanglement between distant qubits generated via photon exchange, which plays the role of a quantum data bus; this approach is most often related to the idea of entanglement swapping, and it is usually probabilistic: a measurement must be successful for the entangled state to be generated.

Both scenarios can be played either in free space, or by using cavity QED techniques, where the atomic or molecular qubit is strongly coupled to a high-Q cavity. This can be done in the optical domain by coupling to an electronic excitation, or in the microwave regime for a transition between Rydberg states or rotational states of a polar molecule. Two-qubit gates between distant qubits can be achieved via photon exchange as quantum data bus, in close formal analogy to the phonon data bus of collective oscillation modes in trapped ions. These cavity QED setups also provide a natural interface to quantum communication with photons.

Atoms and molecules can be stored in optical lattices, corresponding to an array of microtraps generated by counterpropagating laser fields. The dynamics of cold atoms loaded into optical lattices can be described by a Hubbard model, with atoms hopping between lattice sites, and interacting via collisions. Thus cold atoms in optical lattices provide a direct way to simulating condensed matter systems with a large number of bosons or fermions. In addition, loading an optical lattice from an atomic Bose Einstein condensate provides via the superfluid-Mott insulator transition the preparation of a Mott phase with exactly one atom per lattice site, and thus the preparation of a very large number of atomic qubits. These atoms can be entangled in parallel operations with qubit-dependent controllable 2-particle interactions, provided, for example, by coherent collisional interactions in combination with movable qubit (spin) dependent optical lattices. This provides the basis for a digital quantum simulator, for example of a spin lattice system, where the time evolution generated by the Hamiltonian is decomposed into a series of single and two-qubit gates performed in parallel on all qubits (spins).

A major recent development is the possibility to image and (at least partially) address individual atoms in optical lattices. When coupled to atom-atom interactions using either cold collisions or Rydberg dipole-dipole interactions, this opens the way to performing nearly individual measurements on large arrays of entangled atoms, which would be a crucial steps towards quantum simulators and even quantum computers.

For single atoms strongly coupled to an optical cavity, single photons for the purpose of exchanging quantum information between remote locations can be generated on demand and with high quantum efficiency. Protocols for generating a stream of photons with entanglement mediated and controlled by a single intracavity atom have been proposed. In addition to these deterministic mechanisms for entanglement, probabilistic protocols can be developed which are based on free space atoms emitting photons where entanglement is achieved by appropriate photon detection.

Currently, quantum computing with neutral atoms is investigated experimentally in several dozen laboratories worldwide, with half of them located in Europe. The European groups working with a controllable number of atoms include I. Bloch (Munich, DE), T. Esslinger (Zurich, CH), P. Grangier (Palaiseau, FR), S. Haroche (Paris, FR), D. Meschede (Bonn, DE), G. Rempe (Garching, DE), and H. Weinfurter (Munich, DE). Related experiments, sometimes done in an AMO context broader than QIP only, are also performed by W. Ertmer (Hannover, DE), E. Hinds (London, UK), J. Reichel (Paris, FR), and J. Schmiedmayer (Vienna, AT). The experimental program is strongly supported by implementation-oriented theory groups like H. Briegel (Innsbruck, AT), K. Burnett (Oxford, UK), J. I. Cirac (Garching, DE), A. Ekert (Cambridge, UK), P. L. Knight (London, UK), M. Lewenstein (Barcelona, ES), K. Mølmer (Aarhus, DK), M. B. Plenio (London, UK), W. Schleich (Ulm, DE), P. Tombesi (Camerino, IT), R. Werner (Braunschweig, DE), M. Wilkens (Potsdam, DE), & P. Zoller (Innsbruck, AT). In fact, European theory groups have played a crucial role in the development of QIPC science from the very beginning. The close collaboration between experiment and theory in Europe is unique, largely thanks to the support provided by the European Union.