Calcium ions simulate the quantum world
Sep 6, 2011
The first digital “quantum simulator” based on trapped ions has been built by physicists in Austria. The system, developed by Ben Lanyon and colleagues at the University of Innsbruck, comprises a number of trapped calcium ions that are manipulated using sequences of laser pulses. The team has used the system to simulate the time-evolution of several multi-particle systems.
A quantum simulator uses one quantum system to simulate the behaviour of another, less accessible system. For example, by carefully manipulating the laser light and magnetic fields trapping an ensemble of ultracold atoms, researchers can control the interactions between atoms – and therefore simulate interactions that occur between electrons in solids. But unlike electrons in solids, the strength of these interactions can be easily adjusted, allowing physicists to test theories of condensed-matter physics.
Analogue to digital
Most quantum simulators are “analogue” in the sense that the interactions between the trapped atoms are directly analogous to those between electrons. A digital quantum simulator, in contrast, contains an ensemble of interacting quantum particles that act as quantum bits (qubits) and can be used to create quantum logic gates. The quantum system to be simulated is then encoded into the system and the behaviour of the electrons is determined by performing a quantum calculation.
Unlike analogue simulators, which address specific systems, a digital simulator could be used to study a wide range of quantum systems. Furthermore, digital simulators can benefit from error-correction schemes, which means that physicists can be more confident in their results.
But while researchers have had some success creating digital quantum simulators using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques, these work with just two or three qubits and it has proven difficult to scale
up to the 40 or so qubits needed to do a useful quantum simulation. The new trapped-ion quantum simulator created Lanyon and colleagues means that it should, in principle, be much easier to scale up such a system to do useful simulations.
Easily scalable
The team’s experiments begin with a small number of calcium ions (a maximum of six) that are lined up in a row in an electromagnetic trap. Each ion can exist in two electronic states – “0” and “1” – and can therefore act as a qubit. Interactions between individual ions can be controlled by firing carefully selected laser pulses at the trapped ions.
A calculation begins by putting the ions into a specific quantum state. In an experiment involving four ions, for example, each qubit was given the value “1”. A series of laser pulses was then fired at the ions, which causes them to interact with each other creating a sequence of logic gates that process the quantum information held in the initial state.
It is this sequence that simulates the interactions that occur in a real (or imagined) quantum system. In this particular example, the qubits were used to simulate four spin-1/2 particles in which the spin of each particle can interact with the three other particles.
Approximate solutions
Lanyon and colleagues were interested in calculating the time evolution of the spins, which is particularly difficult to do using a classical computer. To do this, the team implement the “Trotter approximation” on their system. This is done by firing a series of pulses that simulates the evolution of the system over a certain period of time before the values of the qubits are read out.
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