New optical system designed to target and control individual atoms
Using laser light, researchers have developed the most robust method currently known to control individual qubits made of the chemical element barium. The ability to reliably control a qubit is an important achievement for realizing future functional quantum computers.
This new method, developed at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), uses a small glass waveguide to separate laser beams and focus them four microns apart, about four-hundredths of the width of a single human hair. The precision and extent to which each focused laser beam on its target qubit can be controlled in parallel is unmatched by previous research.
Our design limits the amount of crosstalk–the amount of light falling on neighbouring ions–to the very small relative intensity of 0.01 per cent, which is among the best in the quantum community
The paper, A guided light system for agile individual addressing of Ba+ qubits with 10−4 level intensity crosstalk, was published by Ali Binai-Motlagh, Dr. Matt Day, Nikolay Videnov, Noah Greenberg, Senko and Islam in Quantum Science and Technology.