Christopher Monroe
Christopher Monroe, distinguished professor at the University of Maryland, Bice Zorn Professor of Physics and fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute, will present “Quantum Computing with Atoms” at a Director’s Special Colloquium on Wednesday, Jan 17, 2018. The colloquium begins at 10:30 a.m. in the Building 402 Auditorium. All employees whose schedules permit are invited to attend.
Shuttle service will be provided starting at 9:45 a.m. with first stop at Building 201, then 212, 202, 203, 200, 205 and 362 to Building 402. Return trips will follow the talk.
Event parking is prohibited along the sides of roads; if the main parking lot is full, please use the APS overflow lot located near Building 450.
Abstract
Quantum information science exploits the bizarre features of quantum mechanics — uncertainty, entanglement and measurement — to perform tasks that are impossible using conventional means, such as computing with unseemly amounts of data and communicating via teleportation. I will describe the architecture of a quantum computer based on individual atomic qubits, including simple applications with a few programmable qubits, as well as quantum simulations of hard spin models using more than 50 atomic spins. Scaling to even larger numbers can be accomplished by using photonic interfaces, where entanglement can be formed over remote distances for applications in quantum communication and distributed quantum computation. By employing such a modular and reconfigurable architecture, it should be possible to scale up atomic-based quantum networks to useful dimensions, for future quantum applications that are impossible to solve using classical processors.
Biography
Christopher Monroe is a leading atomic physicist and quantum information scientist. He demonstrated the first quantum gate in any hardware at NIST in the 1990s, and at the University of Michigan and University of Maryland since 2000 he discovered new ways to scale trapped ion qubits and simplify their control with semiconductor chip traps, simplified pulsed lasers and photonic interfaces for long-distance entanglement. This has led to a fully-connected and reconfigurable quantum computers as well as quantum simulators involving a large number of qubits. He is co-founder and chief scientist at IonQ, a startup company based in Maryland that is building prototype quantum computers. Monroe received the I. I. Rabi and Arthur Schawlow Prizes from the APS and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.