The Stanford Photonics Research Center

September 15, 2008

Atomic ions confined in an array of interconnected traps represent a potentially scalable approach to quantum information processing. All basic requirements have been experimentally demonstrated in one and two qubit experiments and simple quantum algorithms have been demonstrated with up to 8 qubits. The remaining task is to scale the system to hundreds and later thousands of qubits and minimize errors in the system. While this requires extremely challenging technological improvements, no fundamental roadblocks are currently foreseen. The talk will introduce the basic ideas behind this particular approach, give a survey of recent progress in implementing simple quantum algorithms and describe the efforts in scaling up towards a large scale computing device.
 
* Work supported by IARPA and NIST.

Dietrich Leibfried received his diploma (1991) and doctorate degree (1995) in physics while working on precision laser spectroscopy of hydrogen with Theodor W. Hänsch at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. He has been working in the field of quantum information since his post-doctoral appointment in David Wineland’s group at NIST in 1995. From 1998 to 2001 he collaborated with Rainer Blatt holding an assistant professor position at the University of Innsbruck. In spring 2001 he joined NIST in a staff position as co-leader of the group working on quantum information with trapped ions there. Leibfried's honors include the 1993 Helmholtz-prize of the German national institute for physics (PTB), the 2000 START-prize for young researchers of the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) and the 2004 Rudolf-Kaiser prize of the Stifterverband der Wissenschaften in Germany. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles.