News

Fri December 22, 2023

High-fidelity parallel entangling gates in atom arrays

Recently, neutral-atom arrays have emerged as a promising platform for quantum computing. Atom arrays are highly flexible and reconfigurable, allowing coherent control over hundreds of qubits and connectivity between any qubits in the array. The main outstanding challenge of using atom arrays has been to reduce errors in entangling operations, which rely on highly-excited atomic...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Fri December 15, 2023

Scalable Quantum Memory Control in Photonic Circuits

In a study published in “Nano Letters,” MIT and MITRE researchers describe an important advance in controlling spin quantum memories in photonic circuits. Their paper, “Selective and Scalable Control of Spin Quantum Memories in a Photonic Circuit,” offers a new approach for individual-qubit control even when the system is “under-actuated” — i.e., the number of...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Tue December 12, 2023

Programmable Quantum Simulators Meet Quantum Chemistry

In an interdisciplinary collaborative effort, a team of CUA members in the Yelin, Lukin, and Yao groups joined forces with computational quantum chemists in Martin Head-Gordon’s group (UC Berkeley) to develop a novel approach to simulate quantum properties of molecules and materials on state-of-the-art atomic quantum processors. Quantum chemistry is seen as a promising potential...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Mon December 11, 2023

Quantum-computing approach uses single molecules as qubits for first time

Platforms based on molecules manipulated using ‘optical tweezers’ might be able to perform complex physics calculations. Physicists have taken the first step towards building quantum computers out of individual molecules trapped with laser devices called optical tweezers. Two teams report their results in Science on 7 December in both cases making pairs of calcium monofluoride...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Thu November 2, 2023

The power of representation and connectivity in STEM education

CUA postdoc Edwin Pendrozo-Peñafiel served as one of the organizers for Bridging Talents and Opportunities: On Oct. 13 and 14 at the Wong Auditorium at MIT, an event called Bridging Talents and Opportunities took place. It was part of an initiative led by MIT Latinx professors and students aimed at providing talented Latinx high school...
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News type:
CUA in the News
Outreach News
Tue October 31, 2023

Building Big Quantum Computers by Connecting Smaller Ones

Building quantum computers that can function despite their inherently noisy components is a long-standing goal for physicists. Quantum error correcting codes promise to make this possible, but to use them, physicists need to carefully choreograph the interactions between large numbers of qubits. Such scaling to large numbers of qubits is generally anticipated to require connecting...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Wed October 25, 2023

Self-correcting quantum computers within reach?

Quantum computers promise to reach speeds and efficiencies impossible for even the fastest supercomputers of today. Yet the technology hasn’t seen much scale-up and commercialization largely due to its inability to self-correct. Quantum computers, unlike classical ones, cannot correct errors by copying encoded data over and over. Scientists had to find another way. Now, a new...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Thu October 19, 2023

Harvard-MIT CUA Receives Major Renewal Grant

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s Physics Frontiers Centers program renewed a grant to the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms (CUA) to fund exploring, understanding, and harnessing mysterious phenomena at the frontiers of physics. The CUA, which works to enable greater control and programmability of quantum-entangled systems of low-temperature atoms and molecules, will conduct experiments involving...
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News type:
Community News
CUA in the News
Tue October 17, 2023

Professor Kang-Kuen Ni Wins New Horizons in Physics Prize 2023

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation awarded Professor Kang-Kuen Ni the 2023 New Horizons in Physics Prize for “the development of optical tweezer arrays to realize control of individual atoms for applications in quantum information science, metrology, and molecular physics.”
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News type:
Awards
Tue October 17, 2023

Professor Dirk Englund Awarded Humboldt Fellowship

Professor Dirk Englund received a Humbold Award in 2023 after being nominated by both the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light.
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News type:
Awards