Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Rainer Blatt.
Based on a real-time measurement of the motion of a single ion in a Paul trap, we demonstrate its electromechanical cooling below the Doppler limit by homodyne feedback control (cold damping). The feedback cooling results are well described by a model based on a quantum mechanical master equation.
An excited-state atom whose emitted light is backreflected by a distant mirror can experience trapping forces, because the presence of the mirror modifies both the electromagnetic vacuum field and the atom's own radiation reaction field. We demonstrate this mechanical action using a single trapped barium ion. We observe the trapping conditions to be notably altered when the distant mirror is translated across an optical wavelength. The well-localized barium ion enables the spatial dependence of the forces to be measured explicitly. The experiment has implications for quantum information processing and may be regarded as the most elementary optical tweezers.
We report the deterministic creation of maximally entangled three-qubit states-specifically the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state and the W state-with a trapped-ion quantum computer. We read out one of the qubits selectively and show how GHZ and W states are affected by this local measurement. Additionally, we demonstrate conditional operations controlled by the results from reading out one qubit. Tripartite entanglement is deterministically transformed into bipartite entanglement by local operations only. These operations are the measurement of one qubit of a GHZ state in a rotated basis and, conditioned on this measurement result, the application of single-qubit rotations.
Quantum computers have the potential to perform certain computational tasks more efficiently than their classical counterparts. The Cirac-Zoller proposal for a scalable quantum computer is based on a string of trapped ions whose electronic states represent the quantum bits of information (or qubits). In this scheme, quantum logical gates involving any subset of ions are realized by coupling the ions through their collective quantized motion. The main experimental step towards realizing the scheme is to implement the controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate operation between two individual ions. The CNOT quantum logical gate corresponds to the XOR gate operation of classical logic that flips the state of a target bit conditioned on the state of a control bit. Here we implement a CNOT quantum gate according to the Cirac-Zoller proposal. In our experiment, two 40Ca+ ions are held in a linear Paul trap and are individually addressed using focused laser beams; the qubits are represented by superpositions of two long-lived electronic states. Our work relies on recently developed precise control of atomic phases and the application of composite pulse sequences adapted from nuclear magnetic resonance techniques.
Determining classically whether a coin is fair (head on one side, tail on the other) or fake (heads or tails on both sides) requires an examination of each side. However, the analogous quantum procedure (the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm) requires just one examination step. The Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm has been realized experimentally using bulk nuclear magnetic resonance techniques, employing nuclear spins as quantum bits (qubits). In contrast, the ion trap processor utilises motional and electronic quantum states of individual atoms as qubits, and in principle is easier to scale to many qubits. Experimental advances in the latter area include the realization of a two-qubit quantum gate, the entanglement of four ions, quantum state engineering and entanglement-enhanced phase estimation. Here we exploit techniques developed for nuclear magnetic resonance to implement the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm on an ion-trap quantum processor, using as qubits the electronic and motional states of a single calcium ion. Our ion-based implementation of a full quantum algorithm serves to demonstrate experimental procedures with the quality and precision required for complex computations, confirming the potential of trapped ions for quantum computation.