In an ongoing effort to bring quantum science out of the tightly controlled lab environment and into the field, researchers from UC Santa Barbara and the University of Massachusetts Amherst have, for the first time, demonstrated a chip-scale, stabilized, visible light laser that drives a trapped ion atomic optical clock and quantum qubit, paving the way toward compact, portable and scalable trapped-ion quantum information systems.
“This work is foundational in that we demonstrated that chip-scale integrated photonic stabilized lasers can be used to connect precision light to one of the narrowest atomic optical transitions that people work with, with the trapped ion itself created on a surface trap chip operating at room temperature,” said Daniel Blumenthal, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UCSB and a senior author of a paper published in Nature Communications.
Miniaturization is the name of the game for Blumenthal’s research group, which is working to shrink what are normally large lasers and optical components and often room-sized quantum optical light-matter experiments, down to about the size of a deck of cards. The traditional lasers and other components that power these experiments typically occupy 90% of the setup on table-tops and equipment racks that require hand-tuning and are very susceptible to environmental disturbances. In scaling these components down to the chip and providing room temperature operation, it becomes possible to bring the power and precision of quantum measurement, sensing and computation to more researchers and to a wider variety of experiments, as well as making these technologies more robust and portable.
“These portable quantum circuits can then be located at many places on the Earth and flown in satellites, to the moon, and into space,” Blumenthal said. “The ability to use these precision portable clocks opens a wealth of applications and fundamental science including search for dark matter and dark energy, the mapping of gravity, and measurement of general relativity and the search for fundamental constants, and possible time varying changes in these constants.” Networks of these clocks can sense and measure gravity on Earth and create gravity maps around other solar objects, he added, or sense shifts in geological conditions.
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