Sherwin Soltani 4/5/2011 Midterm Journal Write-up Quantum Computation with Trapped Polar Molecules, D.

DeMille This paper presents a novel method for the assembly, manipulation, and read-out of a many-qubit quantum computer. By proposing a mechanism for implementing both one-bit flips and Controlled-NOT (CNOT) gates, it implements an architecture which can be generalized to any computational task, such as those which quantum computers have been suggested to be good at, such as integer factorization using Shors algorithm. This quantum computer contrasts with other methods of implementing qubits which usually involve using NMR or Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) systems (see for example the paper by Schoelkopt et al, Nature, 2004, 431, 162-166). Additionally, it appears to have the theoretical advantage of being easily extended to many qubits, in contrast with other schemes where producing many-qubit systems is much more complicated. This paper proposes using polar diatomic molecules of two alkali metal atoms, cooled to mK temperatures, trapped in a 1-dimensional optical lattice. The atoms are first condensed into molecules at ultra-cold temperatures and then trapped in regions of high intensity by a cooling laser which maintains the molecules at very cold temperatures. The molecules then have a graded electric field applied to them which varies as a function of their position in the lattice (see Fig. 1 of the paper) which induces a net electric dipole in the molecules. The molecules now have two quantized states of their electric dipole moments: with the applied electric field (denoted state |0>) or against it (the first excited state, state |1>). The field experienced by each molecule is a result of both the externally applied graded field as well as the electric dipole moments of the molecules adjacent to it, since they exert their own electric fields (denoted Eint in the paper). A CNOT gate is the quantum equivalent of a classical computers XOR gate, with one minor difference. In a classical computer, the XOR gate can be considered as an irreversible operation (thermodynamically speaking; see R. Landauer, Physics Today, May 1991, 23-29) because it accepts two input bits (classical bits) and produces only one output bit, the value of which is flipped if the control input bit on the gate was set. The CNOT gate, on the other hand, performs a reversible operation, having two inputs and two outputs. If the value of the control input bit is |1>, then the so called target bit of the gate is flipped, and the control bit is

preserved; the operation is thermodynamically reversible, which allows the energy dissipated by the operation to be arbitrarily small. Nonetheless, in the scheme of this paper, the quantum CNOT gate is implemented by exploiting the coupling between each of the neighboring electric dipoles in the optical lattice. Transitions between the |0> and |1> states must necessarily be driven by the amount of energy which separates the two states. In this paper, it is proposed that this be done by using a laser tuned to the specific frequency v such that hv = E, the energy level difference of a specific molecule in the optical lattice when its adjacent neighbor is oriented in the |1> state. This effectively produces a CNOT gate, since the control bit (the neighboring qubit) controls whether or not the applied photons are on- or off-resonance, and thus whether they can drive transitions between the |0> and |1> states of the target bit. It is potentially problematic that the coupling between all the bits in the optical lattice is always present if one wants to do one-bit flips; however, using refocusing techniques similar to the spin-echo refocusing in NMR, the interactions between bits can be ignored for short pulses to perform one-bit flips. The predicted advantages of this quantum computer include, among other things, a long decoherence time. The main source of decoherence in the quantum system comes from the laser providing the optical trap; as the power of the trap is increased, so too is the amount of decoherence it introduces. Thus, the trapping laser must be carefully chosen to be far offresonance for the qubits in the system, as well as to provide a reasonably long decoherence time to maximize the amount of calculations that may be performed. The paper hypothesizes that it should be reasonably simple to populate the optical lattice with ultracold KCs molecules such that exactly one molecule populates each available site of the lattice. However, it states that in its calculations for this hypothesis, it does not account for anisotropy of the dipole-dipole interactions, hence these calculations should be repeated more rigorously in order to confirm this speculation. In the case where the lattice can easily be populated, constructing an array of individually addressable bits which possess the flip and CNOT operations would be a relatively easy task, consisting mainly of cooling the KCs atoms, condensing them together into molecules, trapping them in the lattice and turning on the electric field. The paper predicts the molecules can be held in the trap for up to ~300 seconds with a ~5 second decoherence time, which on the scale of quantum computing is a relatively long time, allowing more quantum calculations to be done.

The final readout of the computers state is accomplished by turning off the graded electric field, thus removing the large part of their effective differences in the field they experience (i.e. their |0> to |1> energy difference is now the same for every qubit), then pulsing a laser to selectively ionize bits in the |0> state. These ionized bits would then be detected using a simple detector plate with sufficiently high resolution to distinguish the location of each bit; then, a pi pulse would be applied by another laser, causing the |1> bits to flip to |0>, and those bits would be selectively ionized again, allowing the |0> and |1> bits to be read out separately and distinguished by location. The drawback to this method is that the final readout of the computers state is destructive. In comparison to other methods which have already been tested to work with one and several qubits, the electric dipole moment quantum computer has yet to be constructed with any working qubits. Technical limitations such as noise from the lasers, difficulty in achieving perfect resonances, and decoherence present challenges to the working of this computer design as of now. However, if these problems can be overcome, this design has great promise as being easily scalable to many qubits in comparison to other quantum computer designs and promises to be relatively simple to set up and perform computations with. For this reason, I would highly suggest this journal article to another student as useful reading for quantum computing.