11 Sep Quantum computers made from optical tweezers
In the future, quantum computers will be used, among other things, to simulate complex physical systems. For example, the temporal evolution of electrons in a molecule. Systems of fermions – the elementary particles that make up matter – cannot easily be simulated with today’s qubit-based quantum computers. Scientists from Austria and the US have therefore developed a novel quantum computer that will use fermionic atoms to simulate complex physical systems. “In quantum computers based on qubits, additional resources have to be used to simulate these properties, usually in the form of more qubits or more extensive quantum circuits,” explains Daniel Gonzalez Cuadra from Peter Zoller’s research group at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck.
Storing and processing quantum information in optical traps
Instead of using entangled qubits, the fermionic quantum computer works with registers and quantum gates in an array of optical tweezers. These are highly focused laser beams that can hold and move atoms with high precision. The registers are formed from unoccupied and occupied optical traps for fermionic and thus neutral atoms. “The required fermionic quantum gates can be easily implemented on this platform,” Cuadra said. “Tunnel gates by controlling the tunneling of an atom between two optical tweezers; interaction gates by first exciting the atoms to Rydberg states, which have a strong dipole moment.”
The researchers showed how their fermionic quantum processor can efficiently simulate fermionic models from quantum chemistry and lattice gauge theory; two important areas of physics that are difficult to solve with classical computers. “Since quantum information is processed directly in fermions, some properties of the simulated system are already present at the hardware level,” Cuadra points out. “I’m very excited about the future of this field and want to continue contributing by identifying the most promising applications for fermionic quantum processing and designing tailored algorithms that can run in soon-to-be-available devices.”
Original publication:
[D. Gonzalez-Cuadra, D. Bluvstein, M. Kalinowski, R. Kaubruegger, N. Maskara, P. Naldesi, T.
V. Zache, A. M. Kaufman, M. D. Lukin, H. Pichler, B. Vermersch, Jun Ye, and P. Zoller, Fermionic quantum processing with programmable neutral atom arrays, PNAS 2023, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2304294120]
Source and image: www.uibk.ac.at
