Research Description
Entanglement — encoding of information in nonlocal correlations — is the essential resource for quantum technologies ranging from computers to enhanced sensors. These applications require scalable entanglement among many particles. A leading platform in this regard is arrays of individual atoms in optical tweezers, boasting many identical qubits, exquisite control down to the single-qubit level, and high-fidelity entangling gates. However, a bottleneck is that typical entangling gates rely on local interactions between neighboring atoms. Schleier-Smith's research aims to augment the atom-array toolbox with powerful methods of nonlocal entanglement, using photons to efficiently convey information between arbitrary atom pairs. A key challenge is to convey the information discreetly, as any leakage to the outside world degrades the resulting correlations. With a novel experimental platform designed to achieve this goal, Schleier-Smith's group will explore new approaches to the important problem of error correction in quantum computers and seek to discover new collective many-body phenomena that may advance understanding of strongly correlated materials.
Schleier-Smith's group is developing a unique experimental setup that will allow for trapping arrays of atomic qubits together with millimeter-wave photons. A pair of superconducting mirrors will form a high-quality resonator that lets the photons bounce back and forth a billion times, enhancing the strength of atom-light interactions that provide a mechanism for entangling many atoms at once. They will apply this apparatus to address three broad questions:
1. How can bottom-up (local) and top-down (collective) entangling operations be combined to maximize the realm of accessible quantum states, — such as for applications in sensing and computation?
2. How can nonlocal connectivity be leveraged to minimize the number of physical qubits required for fault-tolerant quantum computation?
3. What new emergent phenomena arise from the interplay of global and local interactions in a many-body system?
Research Impact
Schleier-Smith's group’s research is primarily motivated by challenges in the field of quantum information processing and may further impact a broader community that relies crucially on understanding the effects of many-particle entanglement, for example, in strongly correlated materials. In the context of quantum computing, detecting and correcting errors requires encoding information redundantly, using many physical qubits per logical qubit. Here, a potential impact is to enable implementation of proposed quantum error correction schemes and quantum algorithms that leverage nonlocal connectivity to significantly reduce the overhead of physical to logical qubits in a quantum processor. More broadly, the combination of local and global interactions offers a promising approach to tailoring the electronic and magnetic properties of materials; and features in toy models for information scrambling in black holes. The group’s research may thus inform fields from materials science to quantum gravity.
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related links
Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative
Science
Stanford University, Department of Physics
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