Quantum computing with ions and atoms

Dean Copsey, Mark Oskin, Frederic T. Chong

Sandu Popescu

A Knill-Laflamme-Milburn (KLM) type quantum computation with bosonic neutral atoms or bosonic ions is suggested. Crucially, as opposite to other quantum computation schemes involving atoms (ions), no controlled interactions between atoms (ions) involving their internal levels are required. Versus photonic KLM computation, this scheme has the advantage that single-atom (ion) sources are more natural than single-photon sources, and single-atom (ion) detectors are far more efficient than single-photon ones.

Christopher R. Monroe, David J. Wineland

Wolfgang Lange

Stewart Allen, Jungsang Kim, David L. Moehring +1 more

We present progress on the construction and operation of a room- temperature quantum computer built with trapped atomic ion qubits. Based on the technological underpinnings of atomic clocks that define time, atomic qubits are standards of quantum information because they are all identical. They present a fundamentally scalable approach to quantum computation where interactions can be faithfully replicated and measured with near-perfect efficiency. Moreover, the connection among atomic ion qubits are forged from external laser beams and mediated by the Coulomb repulsion between them, and hence behave as a fully reconfigurable quantum circuit, much like an FPGA in classical computation. We further discuss paths to scaling using demonstrated technologies that are unique to this class of quantum computation devices. This flexibility will likely allow ion trap quantum computers to express the superset of all known quantum computation operations, and thus efficiently target any type of application that arises.