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Quantum Control of Hyperfine Spins with Coherent Electromagnetic Fields

Seth Merkel, University of New Mexico

(Session 5 : Friday from 5:00-7:00)

Abstract. With long coherence times and well characterized control fields from the "quantum optics toolbox", cold neutral atoms provide a useful platform in which to explore methods and techniques for quantum information processing and quantum control. In this poster we study the use of coherent electromagnetic fields to control ultracold neutral alkali atoms in their electronic ground state. In cesium-133, the two hyperfine manifolds comprise a 16 dimensional state space that we can manipulate with rf/microwave magnetic fields. These fields lead to evolutions that are controllable in the Lie algebraic sense and have a relatively simple geometric structure. We look at three protocols for quantum control in this poster: state preparation (mapping a fiducial state to an arbitrary target state), generating unitary maps from state preparations, and robust state preparations using composite pulse techniques from NMR.