Speaker: Chris Monroe, JQI, University of Maryland
Abstract: Quantum entanglement is the central resource behind Quantum Information Science, and the quantification of entanglement following John Bell's famous inequalities 50 years ago have become tremendously important in the field. Some of the cleanest demonstrations of Bell-Inequality violations have been measured in laser-cooled trapped atomic ions, an experimental platform that has become the standard for quantum bits in a quantum information processor. I will summarize the state-of-the-art in generating entangled states in several trapped ions for quantum information processing and also the quantum simulation of models of quantum magnetism. Scaling to larger numbers can be accomplished by coupling trapped ion qubits to optical photons, where entanglement can be formed over remote distances for applications in quantum communication, quantum teleportation, and distributed quantum computation. By employing such a modular and reconfigurable architecture, it should be possible to scale up ion trap quantum networks to useful dimensions, and hopefully extend Bell's seminal work to the characterization of massive entangled states that cannot even be represented using a classical computer.