Physics Colloquium: The optical route to quantum information processing

Geneva University
Physics Department

24, Quai Ernest Ansermet
CH-1211 Geneva 4

Monday 11 April 2011

17h00 - Ecole de Physique, Auditoire Stückelberg

The optical route to quantum information processing
Prof. Terry Rudolph/Imperial College, London

Photons are attractive as carriers of quantum information both because they travel, and can thus transmit information, but also because of their good coherence properties and ease in undergoing single-qubit manipulations. The main obstacle to their use in information processing is inducing an effective interaction between them in order to produce entanglement. The most promising approach in photon-based information processing architectures is so-called measurement-based quantum computing.

This relies on creating upfront a multi-qubit highly entangled state (the cluster state) which has the remarkable property that, once prepared, it can be used to perform quantum computation by making only single qubit measurements. In this talk I will discuss generically the strengths and weaknesses of this route to optical quantum computing, and then explain a way of turning a single photon source - in particular one built from a self-assembled quantum dot –into a device capable of firing out long strings of entangled cluster state. Such a device would relax stringent requirements existing in current approaches and reduce the resource requirements for optical quantum computing by many orders of magnitude.
 

Une verrée en compagnie du conférencier sera offerte après le colloque.

Prof. Markus Büttiker

 

by Université de Genève