Single Atoms at ICFO

The successful team are Postdoc Markus Hennrich and PhDs Felix Rohde, Carsten Schuck, and Marc Almendros, who have worked towards this goal for more than 3 years. Brice Dubost helped for a while last year, and Roger Gehr is enforcing the team since more recently. Together they built a highly complex and intricate apparatus, which now has shown that it is well constructed, and that it works beautifully. The results have been featured in Catalonia Today.

With these single ions and with another set which the team will trap in a second trap, they plan to study photonic and quantum interaction between distant single atoms, with one of their long-term goals being to realise quantum teleportation from one trapped ion to another one in a distant, independent trap.

Single ions have first been observed in 1980, and have given rise to many important achievements in quantum optics, such as the direct observation of quantum jumps. In the last 10 years they have been investigated for their potential as elementary memory units, or “quantum bits”, in a future quantum computer. Breakthrough results such as quantum logical gates and highly entangled quantum states of 8 ions mark the recent progress in this field.

At ICFO the single-atoms group of Jürgen Eschner set out in 2004 to establish the first Spanish experimental effort towards quantum information processing with trapped ions. After benefitting initially from ICFO start-up funding, they now pursue their objectives within several national and international projects and collaborations, such as the EC Integrated Project “SCALA”, the Plan Nacional project “QLIQS”, and the Consolder-Ingenio 2010 project “QOIT”. Some important parts of the apparatus have been designed and constructed in close cooperation with the ion trapping group at the University of Innsbruck, J. Eschner’s former group.