Research

Two dimensional crystals of ions offer a potential solution to scale up systems of trapped ions to larger numbers of usable qubits. This could open up the door to additional error correction schemes and is a  more natural platform for performing quantum simulations of 2D spin models. We are investigating the properties of 2D crystals with the goal of enabling these type of experiments.

Our work on quantum jumps seeks to answer the questions ‘are transitions of quantum systems under continuous measurement genuinely stochastic and instantaneous as predicted by standard models of quantum mechanics’ and ‘do correlations between these events occur in multi-particle systems’. This work has implications for quantum fundamentals and the technology we develop to answer these questions opens the door for improved protocols in quantum information. 

In conjunction with our collaborators in Kai Mei-Fu’s group, our research aims to entangle a qubit implemented via the hyperfine structure of the ground state of a Ytterbium ion with the spin of a donor bound exciton in ZnO. Such a system may enable a hybrid quantum device to leverage the long coherence times demonstrated in ionic qubits for state storage and readout while utilizing the far faster gate speeds achieved in semiconductor qubits with photonic transduction generating entanglement between the subsystems.