Quantum simulation of the Klein paradox

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Published: Friday, 11 February 2011

In an experiment carried out in 2009, our group has performed a quantum simulation of the Dirac equation using a single trapped ion and observed so called Zitterbewegung, a peculiar quivering motion of free relativistic quantum particles predicted by the Dirac equation. In a recent experiment we have implemented a more sophisticated quantum simulation, which made it possible to observe another counter-intuitive prediction of the Dirac equation: the Klein paradox.


Multifaceted entanglement

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Published: Friday, 07 May 2010

The entanglement of quantum objects can take surprising forms. The quantum physicists at the University of Innsbruck, Prof. Rainer Blatt and Dr. Julio Barreiro, have investigated several facets of entanglement in four trapped ions and report their results in the journal Nature Physics. Their study promotes further developments towards quantum computing and a deeper understanding of the foundations of quantum mechanics.


From a classical laser to a "quantum laser"

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Published: Sunday, 28 March 2010

Rainer Blatt's and Piet Schmidt's research team from the University of Innsbruck have successfully realized a single-atom laser, which shows the properties of a classical laser as well as quantum mechanical properties of the atom-photon interaction. The scientists have published their findings in the journal Nature Physics.


Quantum simulation of the Dirac equation

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Published: Sunday, 31 January 2010

In a recent experiment, our group has performed a quantum simulation of the Dirac equation using a single trapped ion and observed so called Zitterbewegung, a peculiar quivering motion of free relativistic quantum particles predicted by the Dirac equation.


New quantum gate realised

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Published: Wednesday, 28 January 2009

A new important building block for a future quantum computer has been realised by physicists at the Institute for Experimental Physics in Innsbruck and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI): a gate acting on three quantum bits, the so-called Toffoli gate, as has been reported in Physical Review Letters.


Deterministic entanglement swapping

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Published: Sunday, 26 October 2008

Entanglement—once only a subject of disputes about the foundation of quantum mechanics—has today become an essential issue in the emerging field of quantum information processing, promising a number of applications, including secure communication, teleportation and powerful quantum computation. Therefore, a focus of current experimental work in the field of quantum information is the creation and manipulation of entangled quantum systems. Here, we present our results on entangling two qubits in an ion-trap quantum processor not through a direct interaction of the ion qubits but instead through the action of a protocol known as entanglement swapping.


Towards fault-tolerant quantum computing with trapped ions

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Published: Sunday, 27 April 2008

Choosing the rules of quantum physics as the physical basis for constructing models of computation allows for solving certain computational problems more efficiently as in models based on classical physics. In the quantum circuit model, information is encoded in quantum bits and manipulated by applying appropriate quantum operations acting on the joint state space of the qubits. Similar to what is done in classical computation, these quantum operations can be decomposed into a sequence of gate operations, consisting of single-qubit operations and entangling operations acting on pairs of qubits.


Precision spectroscopy with entangled states

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Published: Thursday, 21 September 2006

We make use of a decoherence-free subspace with specifically designed entangled states to demonstrate precision spectroscopy of a pair of trapped Ca+ ions; we obtain the electric quadrupole moment, which is of use for frequency standard applications.


Scalable multiparticle entanglement of trapped ions

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Published: Thursday, 01 December 2005

We report the scalable and deterministic generation of four-, five-, six-, seven- and eight-particle entangled states of the W type with trapped ions. We obtain the maximum possible information on these states by performing full characterization via state tomography, using individual control and detection of the ions.