Physics colloquium-“An Old Qubit Contender Becomes New Again: Neutral Atoms”

Benjamin Bloom

Atom Computing

Abstract: Neutral atoms trapped in optical tweezers are a promising platform for implementing scalable quantum computers. Here I introduce a system with the ability to individually manipulate a two-dimensional array of nuclear spin qubits. Each qubit is encoded in the ground state manifold of 87Sr and is individually addressable by site-selective beams. We observe negligible spin relaxation after 5 seconds, indicating that T1 ≫ 5 s. We also demonstrate significant phase coherence over the entire array, measuring T2⋆ = (21 ± 7) s.  Capitalizing on these beneficial properties of our optical tweezer platform, we aim to scale this system to a larger array of qubits in a parallelizable manner. Furthermore, these qubits can be entangled utilizing site-slectice Rydberg excitation creating a universal gate set.

Biography: Ben received his PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder where he worked on Optical Atomic Clocks. Afterwards he worked at Intel on classical computers, at Rigetti on Superconducting Josephson Junctions and in 2018 founded Atom Computing. He is the CTO of Atom Computing directing R&D efforts both on current systems as well as future systems being built at Atom.

Lecture held in CoorsTek 140/150.