Physics Colloquium - "Quantum Computing With Atoms"

Trapped atomic ions are a leading physical platform for quantum computers, featuring qubits with essentially infinite idle coherence times. Such atomic clock qubits are controlled with laser beams, allowing densely-connected and reconfigurable universal gate sets. The path to scale involves concrete architectural paths, from shuttling ions between QPU cores to modular photonic interconnects between multiple QPUs.  Full-stack ion trap quantum computers have thus moved away from the physics of qubits and gates and toward the engineering of optical control signals, quantum gate compilation for algorithms, and high level system design considerations. I will summarize the state-of-the-art in these quantum computers and speculate on how they might be used for science and beyond.

 Christopher Monroe is Professor of ECE and Physics at Duke University and co-Founder and Chief Scientist of IonQ, Inc. based in College Park, MD.  Monroe leads the largest trapped ion quantum information science community in the world. He is Fellow of the APS, OSA, AAAS, and IOP, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and is one of the key architects of the recent U.S. National Quantum Initiative.