Tue October 21, 2014 4:00 pm
Quantum information, decoherence-free subspaces and a Michelson-Morley test with electrons
Location:MIT 26-214
Dr. Hartmut Haeffner,
University of California - Berkeley
Ten Minute Talk:"Tuning friction atom-by-atom in an ion crystal simulator" by
Dorian Gangloff
Quantum information processing promises to speed up certain computational tasks. The expectations are high, but many technological hurdles have to be overcome before we can build a quantum computer. Nevertheless, already today quantum information allows for novel insights into physics. In this talk, I will summarize our progress towards building an ion trap quantum computer as well as a surprising application of quantum information to fundamental physics. Using the precise experimental control over individual ions, we verify Lorentz invariance at a level of 10-18, improving the limits set by traditional Michelson-Morley experiments by a factor of five.