Breakthrough in the creation of massive numbers of entangled qubits

Olivier Pfister, a professor of physics in the University of Virginia’s College of Arts & Sciences, has just published findings in the journal Physical Review Letters demonstrating a breakthrough in the creation of massive numbers of entangled qubits, more precisely a multilevel variant thereof called Qmodes.

Pfister and researchers in his lab used sophisticated lasers to engineer 15 groups of four entangled Qmodes each, for a total of 60 measurable Qmodes, the most ever created. They believe they may have created as many as 150 groups, or 600 Qmodes, but could measure only 60 with the techniques they used.

Each Qmode is a sharply defined color of the electromagnetic field. In lieu of a coin toss measurement, the Qmode measurement outcomes are the number of quantum particles of light (photons) present in the field. Hundreds to thousands of Qmodes would be needed to create a quantum computer, depending on the task.

Physical Review Letters – Parallel Generation of Quadripartite Cluster Entanglement in the Optical Frequency Comb

Scalability and coherence are two essential requirements for the experimental implementation of quantum information and quantum computing. Here, we report a breakthrough toward scalability: the simultaneous generation of a record 15 quadripartite entangled cluster states over 60 consecutive cavity modes (Q modes), in the optical frequency comb of a single optical parametric oscillator. The amount of observed entanglement was constant over the 60 Q modes, thereby proving the intrinsic scalability of this system. The number of observable Q modes was restricted by technical limitations, and we conservatively estimate the actual number of similar clusters to be at least 3 times larger. This result paves the way to the realization of large entangled states for scalable quantum information and quantum computing.

Arxiv – Parallel Generation of Quadripartite Cluster Entanglement in the Optical Frequency Comb (11 pages – including supplemental information)

Conclustion – We demonstrated that the optical frequency comb of a single optical parametric oscillator lives up to its promise as an extremely scalable system for quantum information. We simultaneously generated a record number of quadripartite cluster states, in a record number of Qmodes, all equally entangled. The quantum comb was read by two-tone homodyne detection. Even though the size of the entangled states themselves is not a record, compared to the 14-ion GHZ state, we demonstrated stringent state preparation requirements for cluster states, a universal quantum computing resource. A practical quantum computer will require an increase in both the number of entangled modes and amount of squeezing. However, the projective measurements required for one-way quantum computing can already be performed on the clusters that we generated. Variants of our setup will allow the generation of multiple cube graphs, and a scalable quantum wire and square-grid lattice.

“With this result, we hope to move from this multitude of small-size quantum processors to a single, massively entangled quantum processor, a prerequisite for any quantum computer,” Pfister said.

Pfister’s group used an exotic laser called an optical parametric oscillator, which emitted entangled quantum electromagnetic fields (the Qmodes) over a rainbow of equally spaced colors called an “optical frequency comb.”

With their experiments, Pfister’s group completed a major step to confirm an earlier theoretical proof by Pfister and his collaborators that the quantum version of the optical frequency comb could be used to create a quantum computer.

“Some mathematical problems, such as factoring integers and solving the Schrödinger equation to model quantum physical systems, can be extremely hard to solve,” Pfister said. “In some cases the difficulty is exponential, meaning that computation time doubles for every finite increase of the size of the integer, or of the system.”

Randomness plays a greater role in quantum evolution than in classical evolution, Pfister said. Randomness is not an obstacle to deterministic predictions and control of quantum systems, but it does limit the way information can be encoded and read from qubits.

Physical Review Letters – One-Way Quantum Computing in the Optical Frequency Comb (2008)

One-way quantum computing allows any quantum algorithm to be implemented easily using just measurements. The difficult part is creating the universal resource, a cluster state, on which the measurements are made. We propose a scalable method that uses a single, multimode optical parametric oscillator (OPO). The method is very efficient and generates a continuous-variable cluster state, universal for quantum computation, with quantum information encoded in the quadratures of the optical frequency comb of the OPO.

“As quantum information became better understood, these limits were circumvented by the use of entanglement, deterministic quantum correlations between systems that behave randomly, individually,” he said. “As far as we know, entanglement is actually the ‘engine’ of the exponential speed up in quantum computing.”

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