School Of Physics Fall Colloquium Series-Dr. Ana Maria Rey

Speaker: Ana Maria Rey

Host: Brian Sawyer (GTRI)/Colin Parker

Title: Advances in Quantum Simulation and Sensing Using Two Dimensional Ion Crystals

Abstract: Two-dimensional crystals of ions generated by the use of a Penning trap offer the possibility of scalable quantum information processing with samples of as many as 500 ions. Up to date, nevertheless, most of the protocols used in the Penning trap typically operate in a far-detuned regime where the phonons of the crystal are used only to mediate interactions between the internal states in the ions (spins). Consequently, the generated spin–spin interactions are slow compared to the original spin-phonon coupling, making any generated entanglement susceptible to decoherence. In this talk I will discuss schemes that resonantly couple internal and motional degrees of freedom and fully leverage the available spin-phonon coupling. In particular, I will describe how these schemes can be used to create metrologically useful states for electric field sensing or phase estimation or entangled states for quantum teleportation which enjoy the beneficial short timescales associated with the resonant interactions. This work suggests new capabilities offered by trapped ions for the preparation of many-body states with tailored correlations for quantum-enhanced metrology, which can access physics beyond the standard-model, and for information processing tasks.

Bio: Prof. Ana Maria Rey obtained her bachelor’s degree in physics in 1999 from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. She pursued her graduate studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, receiving a Ph.D. in 2004. She then joined the Institute of Theoretical, Molecular and Optical Physics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a Postdoctoral Fellow from 2005 to 2008. She joined JILA, NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder faculty in 2008. She is currently a JILA and NIST fellow and a Professor Adjoint in the Department of Physics. Rey’s research focuses on how to control and manipulate ultra-cold atoms, molecules and trapped ions for use as quantum simulators of solid state materials and for quantum information and precision measurements. Rey’s recognition to her work include, among others a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2013), the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists (2019), the National Academy of Science membership (2023) and the Presidential rank Award (2023).