Christopher Monroe: "Modular Ion Trap Quantum Networks: Going Big"

Christopher Monroe visited the Google LA Quantum AI Lab on May 4, 2015. Abstract: Laser-cooled and trapped atomic ions are standards for quantum information science, acting as qubits with unsurpassed levels of quantum coherence while also allowing near-perfect measurement. Trapped ions can be entangled locally with external laser beams that map the internal atomic qubits through their Coulomb-coupled motion; they can be entangled remotely through optical photons traveling through fibers. This quantum hardware platform scales favorably when compared to any other platform, because (a) each trapped ion is an atomic clock that is identical to the others, (b) the qubit wiring (interaction graph) is provided by external fields and is hence reconfigurable, and (c) the modular architecture of local and remote quantum gates provides a realistic path to building out huge systems with thousands of qubits. I will summarize the state-of-the art in ion trap quantum networks, which will soon involve systems of 50+ fully-interacting qubits, eclipsing the performance of classical computers for certain tasks. The remaining challenges in the ion trap architecture are primarily engineering, setting the stage for focused efforts to build a large scale quantum computer. Bio: Christopher Monroe is an quantum physicist who specializes in the isolation of individual atoms for applications in quantum information science. After graduating from MIT, Monroe studied with Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell at the University of Colorado, earning his PhD in Physics in 1992. His work paved the way toward the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in 1995 and led to the 2001 Nobel Prize for Wieman and Cornell. From 1992-2000 he was a postdoc then staff physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in the group of David Wineland. With Wineland, Monroe led the team that demonstrated the first quantum logic gate in 1995, and exploited the use of trapped atoms for the first controllable qubit demonstrations, eventually leading to Wineland's Nobel Prize in 2012. In 2000, Monroe became Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he pioneered the use of single photons to couple quantum information between atoms and also demonstrated the first electromagnetic atom trap integrated on a semiconductor chip. From 2006-2007 was the Director of the National Science Foundation Ultrafast Optics Center at the University of Michigan. In 2007 he became the Bice Zorn Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland and a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute. In 2008, Monroe's group succeeded in producing quantum entanglement between two widely separated atoms and for the first time teleported quantum information between matter separated by a large distance. Since 2009 his group has investigated the use of ultrafast laser pulses for speedy quantum entanglement operations, pioneered the use of trapped ions for quantum simulations of many-body models related to quantum magnetism, and with Jungsang Kim (Duke University) has proposed and made the first steps toward a scalable, reconfigurable, and modular quantum computer.