Atmospheric Physics Building,Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PU
Professor Ivan Deutsch, University of New Mexico
Abstract
Individual atoms in free space are natural carriers of quantum information: they are perfectly identical, well isolated from the environment, and easily controlled with optical and rf fields. While trapped atomic ions have been a leading contender for quantum computing, their neutral cousins have been on the sidelines. This has changed dramatically in the last few years due to advances in techniques for trapping in optical tweezer arrays and new approaches to creating high-fidelity entangling gates. Still there’s lots to do, with new opportunity for innovation. In this talk I will consider the unique possibilities of quantum computing with qudits (with d>2 levels), by encoding in the nuclear spins of alkaline earth atoms, such as strontium-87, with d=10 Using quantum control one can implement a universal gate set, including single qudit SU(10) gates, and two-qudit entangling gates. Moreover, by encoding a qubit in a spin-cat qudit, one can design hardware efficient fault-tolerant error correcting codes, analogous to the cat-codes for bosons.