Description
Dr. Brian DeMarco, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, NIST describes their current work. Trapped atomic ions are an ideal system for exploring quantum information science because deterministic state preparation and efficient state detection are possible and coherent manipulation of atomic systems is relatively advanced. In their experiment, a few singly charged Be ions are confined by static and radio-frequency electric fields in a micro-machined linear Paul trap. The internal and motional states of the ions are coherently manipulated using applied laser light. Their focus is on demonstrating the necessary ingredients to produce a scalable quantum computing scheme and on simplifying and improving quantum logic gates.