QSE Quantum Seminar: Quantum science with Rydberg atom arrays, Wenchao Xu

Please join us for the QSE Center Quantum Seminar with Prof. Wenchao Xu from ETH Zurich who will speak on Friday, October 6, about  "Quantum science with Rydberg atom arrays". 

Location: CE 1 103

Pizzas will be available before the seminar at 12:00. All PhDs, postdocs, students, and PIs are welcome to join us.

TITLE: Quantum science with Rydberg atom arrays

ABSTRACT: Quantum science promises great potential to revolutionize our current technologies. Arrays of individual atoms trapped in optical tweezers have emerged as an attractive architecture for quantum computation and simulation. This architecture has demonstrated great advantages in scalability, and programmability over the array configurations. Controllable inter-atomic interactions are achieved via the Rydberg states of atoms, which facilitate two-qubit gate operations and to simulate quantum many-body systems.

In this talk, I will first do a brief review on this architecture and the rapid progress during the past few years, and point out several challenges and ongoing effort at this moment. Then I will outline my proposed research at ETH, which aims for building a novel architecture for quantum computation/simulation with dual type dual-element atom arrays. I expect this architecture can mitigate some long-standing challenges, including individual addressability and rapid non-demolition selective detection.

BIO: Wenchao Xu is a tenure track assistant professor in the Physics Department since August 2022. She currently is also a group leader at Paul Scherrer Institute. Prior to join ETH Zurich, she worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 2018 and 2022. She received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign in 2018. Her research interests are centered on quantum simulation, quantum computation, and quantum nonlinear optics with experimental platforms based on neutral atoms.