Physics Commons^™

Assembling And Characterizing The Efficiency Of An Injection Locked Laser System For Cold Neutral Atom Optical Traps, Alexandra Papa Crawford

Physics

Creating a quantum computer requires a system of particles that can be well-controlled to achieve quantum operations. We need a large array of these particles – called qubits – with long coherence times, which can be initialized, operated on by single and two qubit gates, and read out. For neutral atoms, the qubit states are stable ground states that interact minimally with the environment, leading to long coherence times. Experimentally, the qubits are manipulated using carefully timed laser beam pulses with controlled frequency and intensity, but the outstanding issue for optically trapping cold atoms is finding a light pattern that …