Quantum Information Science & Technology
Computer chips can’t get much smaller, but they can get faster. That means moving electrons around more quickly. To speed up computers and possibly enable other technologies, scientists want to use light to drive electric currents. The Nesbitt Lab studied gold nanostars and found a way to optically control currents at the nanoscale.
By using optical tweezers, the Kaufman and Ye groups are exploring a new kind of optical atomic clock—one that can run measurements for more than half a minute, an unprecedented coherence time. Not only does this finding open new possibilities for precision measurement, it’s a starting point to engineer interactions between many coherent and carefully-controlled atoms.
Mechanical oscillators are crucial to developing quantum computers and quantum networks, but they have to fight against noise. Measuring the quantum movement of the oscillator not only reduces its noise, it perfectly displays the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Strontium is an incredible element at the center of quantum physics tools and studies—most famously optical atomic clocks. While strontium atoms have one very long-lived excited state (which lives more than 100 seconds), they also have nicely accessible excited states. Those excited states are easier to access, but they are short-lived. A new proposal from the Rey Theory Group suggests a way to reach a dark state where the atoms can live in this excited state forever, opening new opportunities for clock technologies.
Chris Kiehl, a graduate student in the Regal Group, won a prize for his poster on quantum sensing and metrology at a conference in Germany this summer.
For the first time, JILA scientists are able to observe dynamical phase transitions in an out-of-equilibrium system. They also found that they could undo the dynamical changes, reversing the experiment to where it started, which has great implications for understanding how the quantum world behaves and acts as a model for superconductors.
JILA Fellow Ana Maria Rey has been named a finalist for the prestigious Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists.
The holy grail of modern quantum science is to make a stable quantum computer. Now an experiment is on its way to create a quantum computer that is stable and can last longer using the sophisticated clock at JILA.
JILA researchers have proposed a simple experiment to realize and study rapid scrambling, the process by which quantum information spreads throughout a complex system and becomes inaccessible to simple local measurements, thus becoming apparently lost. Understanding rapid scrambling, as well as how it connects to chaos and entanglement, is key not only for building quantum computers but also for explaining open question about our universe such as the behavior of black holes and quantum gravity.
JILA researchers have, for the first time, trapped a single alkaline-earth atom and cooled it to its ground state. To trap this atom, researchers used an optical tweezer, which is a laser focused to a pinpoint that can hold, move and manipulate atoms. The full motional and electronic control wielded by this tool enables microscopically precise studies of the limiting factors in many of today’s forefront physics experiments, especially quantum information science and metrology.