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K B Whaley

Publications and source records attributed to K B Whaley.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Transition from molecular complex to quantum solvation in 4HeNOCS.

We present fully quantum calculations of the rotational energy levels and spectroscopic rotational constants of the linear OCS molecule in variable size clusters of 4He. The rotational constants of OCS are found to decrease monotonically from the gas phase value as the number of helium atoms increases to N=6, after which the average constant increases to saturation at the large droplet value by N=20. The minimum is shown to indicate a transition from a molecular complex to a quantum solvated molecule, with the former characterized by floppy but near rigid behavior, while the latter is characterized by nonzero permutation exchanges and a smaller extent of rigid coupling.

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Coherence-preserving quantum bits.

Real quantum systems couple to their environment and lose their intrinsic quantum nature through the process known as decoherence. Here we present a method for minimizing decoherence by making it energetically unfavorable. We present a Hamiltonian made up solely of two-body interactions between four two-level systems (qubits) which has a 2-fold degenerate ground state. This degenerate ground state has the property that any decoherence process acting on an individual physical qubit must supply energy from the bath to the system. Quantum information can be encoded into the degeneracy of the ground state and such coherence-preserving qubits will then be robust to local decoherence at low bath temperatures. We show how this quantum information can be universally manipulated and indicate how this approach may be applied to a quantum dot quantum computer.

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Universal quantum computation with the exchange interaction.

Various physical implementations of quantum computers are being investigated, although the requirements that must be met to make such devices a reality in the laboratory at present involve capabilities well beyond the state of the art. Recent solid-state approaches have used quantum dots, donor-atom nuclear spins or electron spins; in these architectures, the basic two-qubit quantum gate is generated by a tunable exchange interaction between spins (a Heisenberg interaction), whereas the one-qubit gates require control over a local magnetic field. Compared to the Heisenberg operation, the one-qubit operations are significantly slower, requiring substantially greater materials and device complexity--potentially contributing to a detrimental increase in the decoherence rate. Here we introduced an explicit scheme in which the Heisenberg interaction alone suffices to implement exactly any quantum computer circuit. This capability comes at a price of a factor of three in additional qubits, and about a factor of ten in additional two-qubit operations. Even at this cost, the ability to eliminate the complexity of one-qubit operations should accelerate progress towards solid-state implementations of quantum computation.

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