Hoi-Kwan Lau

We revisit the dissipative approach to producing and stabilizing spin-squeezed states of an ensemble of $N$ two-level systems, providing a detailed analysis of two surprising yet generic features of such protocols. The first is a macroscopic sensitivity of the steady state to whether $N$ is even or odd. We discuss how this effect can be avoided (if the goal is parity-insensitive squeezing), or could be exploited as a new kind of sensing modality to detect the addition or removal of a single spin. The second effect is an anomalous emergent long timescale and a "prethermalized" regime that occurs for even weak single-spin dephasing. This effect allows one to have strong spin squeezing over a long transient time even though the level of spin squeezing in the steady state is very small. We also discuss a general hybrid-systems approach for implementing dissipative spin squeezing that does not require squeezed input light or complex multi-level atoms, but instead makes use of bosonic reservoir-engineering ideas. Our protocol is compatible with a variety of platforms, including trapped ions, NV defect spins coupled to diamond optomechanical crystals, and spin ensembles coupled to superconducting microwave circuits.

I propose a method to remove the axial motional excitation from an ion qubit within a few oscillation periods of a harmonic trap. The principle is to prepare another coolant ion in its motional ground state, and then apply a phonon beam splitter to swap the motional state between the ions without affecting the internal state. This method requires only the precise control of the trapping potential, thus its performance does not suffer from the limitations of current laser-cooling schemes. With sufficient coolant ions pre-prepared, this method can rapidly re-cool ion qubits during quantum information processing.

We describe a possible architecture to implement a universal bosonic simulator (UBS) using trapped ions. Single ions are confined in individual traps, and their motional states represent the bosonic modes. Single-mode linear operators, nonlinear phase-shifts, and linear beam splitters can be realized by precisely controlling the trapping potentials. All the processes in a bosonic simulation, except the initialization and the readout, can be conducted beyond the Lamb-Dicke regime. Aspects of our proposal can also be applied to split adiabatically a pair of ions in a single trap.

We investigate the error due to D.C. Stark effect for quantum information processing for trapped ion quantum computers using the scalable architecture proposed in J. Res. Natl. Inst. Stan. 103, 259 (1998) and Nature 417, 709 (2002). As the operation speed increases, dephasing and decoherence due to the D.C. Stark effect becomes prominent as a large electric field is applied for transporting ions rapidly. We estimate the relative significance of the decoherence and dephasing effects and find that the latter is dominant. We find that the minimum possible of dephasing is quadratic in the time of flight, and an inverse cubic in the operational time scale. From these relations, we obtain the operational speed-range at which the shifts caused by D.C. Stark effect, no matter follow which trajectory the ion is transported, are no longer negligible. Without phase correction, the maximum speed a qubit can be transferred across a 100 micron-long trap, without excessive error, in about 10 ns for Calcium ion and 50 ps for Beryllium ion. In practice, the accumulated error is difficult to be tracked and calculated, our work gives an estimation to the range of speed limit imposed by D.C. Stark effect.