Optical lattice-based addressing and control of long-lived neutral-atom qubits

Nathan Lundblad, Radu Chicireanu, Karl Nelson, Trey Porto

NIST Gaithersburg, MD 20899.

Quantum computational platforms are driven by competing needs: the isolation of the quantum system from the environment to prevent decoherence, and the ability to control the system with external fields. For example, neutral-atom optical-lattice architectures provide environmental isolation through the use of "clock" states that are robust against changing external fields, yet those same external fields are inherently useful for qubit addressing. Here we demonstrate a technique to address a spatially dense field-insensitive qubit register. A subwavelength-scale effective magnetic-field gradient permits the addressing of particular “marked” elements of the lattice register, leaving unmarked qubits unaffected, with little worry about crosstalk or leakage. We demonstrate this technique with rubidium atoms, and show that we can robustly perform single-qubit rotations on qubits located at addressed lattice sites. This precise coherent control is an important step forward for lattice-based neutral-atom quantum computation, and is applicable to state transfer and qubit isolation in other architectures using field-insensitive qubits..

CATEGORY: Physics

Mentor’s Name:  Trey Porto

Atomic Physics Division, Physics Laboratory

B255, 216 8424

Tel:x5913

Email:nathan.lundblad@nist.gov

Is your mentor a Sigma Xi Member?     No