Electric-dipole forbidden spectroscopic transitions in atoms form the basis of many advanced implementations of quantum computers, atomic clocks and quantum sensors. Coherently addressing such transitions in molecules which are among the most ubiquitous and versatile quantum objects has remained a long-standing challenge owing to their complex energy-level structure. Here, we report the search, observation and coherent manipulation of electric-quadrupole rotational-vibrational transitions in single trapped molecules using a quantum-logic-spectroscopy protocol. We identified individual hyperfine-Zeeman-rotational components of the fundamental vibrational transition of the nitrogen molecular ion, N
2+, and performed coherent population transfer between energy levels. Our work opens up new perspectives for precision molecular spectroscopy, for high-fidelity qubits encoded in the rotational-vibrational motion of molecules, for precise infrared molecular clocks and for searches for new physics
Accurate rotation–vibration energy levels and transition dipoles of the molecule thiophosgene are used to model the execution of quantum gates with shaped laser pulses. Qubits are encoded in 2 n vibrational computing states on the ground electronic surface of the molecule. Computations are carried out by cycling amplitude between these computing states and a gateway state with a shaped laser pulse. The shaped pulse that performs the computation is represented by a physical model of a 128–1024 channel pulse shaper. Pulse shapes are optimized with a standard genetic algorithm, yielding experimentally realizable computing pulses. The robustness of optimization is studied as a function of the vibrational states selected, rotational level structure, additional vibrational levels not assigned to the computation, and compensation for laser power variation across a molecular ensemble.
Elementary quantum gates have been constructed using molecular vibrational and rotational modes to encode two qubits and implement the Deutsch–Jozsa algorithm. The molecular system chosen was 12C16O. Several phase-correct global quantum gates were constructed using optimal control theory (OCT). The gate fidelity was more than 90%. On implementing the Deutsch–Jozsa algorithm combining these elementary gates, a fidelity greater than 96.11% was obtained, which indicates that vibrational and rotational qubits are promising for performing quantum algorithms.