Southwest Quantum Information and Technology

Entangling Atomic Spins with a Rydberg-Dressed Spin-Flip Blockade

Presenting Author: Grant Biedermann, Sandia National Laboratories
Contributing Author(s): Jongmin Lee, Yuan-Yu Jau, Tyler Keating, Ivan Deutsch

Controlling quantum entanglement between parts of a many-body system is the key to unlocking the power of quantum information processing for applications such as quantum computation, high-precision sensing, and simulation of many-body physics. Spin degrees of freedom of ultracold neutral atoms in their ground electronic state provide a natural platform given their long coherence times and our ability to control them with magneto-optical fields, but creating strong coherent coupling between spins has been challenging. We demonstrate for the first time a strong and tunable Rydberg-dressed interaction between spins of individually trapped cesium atoms with energy shifts of order 1 MHz in units of Planck's constant. This interaction leads to a ground-state spin-flip blockade, whereby simultaneous hyperfine spin flips of two atoms are blockaded due to their mutual interaction. We employ this spin-flip blockade to rapidly produce single-step Bell-state entanglement between two atoms with a fidelity >= 81(2) %.

Read this article online: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v12/n1/full/nphys3487.html

(Session 5 : Thursday from 5:00 - 7:00 pm)