Home, Jonathan

Date:   Thursday, July 9, 2020
Time:   10:00
Place:   scheduled Zoom meeting
Host:    Klaus Ensslin

Laser cooling and quantum error correction

Jonathan Home
ETH Zurich

Both laser cooling and quantum error correction are dissipative processes, designed to remove entropy from a quantum system in order to bring it close to a pure state. For laser cooling, the target state is fixed, often being the ground state of motion. However more general reservoir engineering enables other target states to be reached directly through engineering of the cooling process. Quantum-error correction, by contrast, aims to maintain a system in a subspace of Hilbert space where computations are being performed, allowing a quantum computer to stay in a low-entropy configuration to utilize its special quantum features. I will describe these connections in the context of a single trapped-ion harmonic oscillator, where experiments on autonomous error-correction with Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill codes have given rise to ground-state laser cooling techniques which are particularly efficient with respect to entropy extraction. These techniques also raise the prospect of long-term protection of logical qubits by relatively simple cooling techniques.