Abstract:
The intense, global race towards building a useful quantum computer is driven by the possibility of solving important problems that are intractable for the fastest conventional computers. Our quantum simulation and quantum computation platform at Harvard consists of 2D arrays of hundreds of neutral atoms, trapped in optical tweezers and coherently coupled to Rydberg states. With this platform, we have for the first time demonstrated the universal properties of an Ising quantum phase transition in (2+1) dimensions. In addition, we have observed surprising quantum many-body scar dynamics after quenches from antiferromagnetically-ordered initial states, and realized a topologically-ordered quantum spin liquid state on a kagome lattice. Finally, we are actively exploring quantum optimization of graph problems that can be encoded efficiently on our platform.
Biography:
Tout Wang is a research associate in the group of Mikhail Lukin at Harvard University. After undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto and a PhD in the group of Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT, he joined M Squared Lasers as a scientific adviser and was also previously an assistant professor of physics at Gordon College.
Seminar by the NYU-ECNU Institute of Physics at NYU Shanghai