QSE Quantum Seminar: Trapped ion quantum computers and the challenge of scaling

Please join us for the QSE Center Quantum Seminar with Dr Cornelius Hempel from the Paul Scherrer Institute, who will speak Thursday February 22 on "Trapped ion quantum computers and the challenge of scaling". 
Location: CM 1 4

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

TITLE: Trapped ion quantum computers and the challenge of scaling 

ABSTRACT: Trapped ions provide an excellent platform for quantum science experiments with leading performance metrics in fidelities, coherence times and quantum volume. While qubits are identical, a major challenge of the platform is scalability, i.e. extending the same level of control over larger numbers of qubits. Work in this direction has been going on for a number of years already and promising avenues have been identified that pave the way to realizing a large scale error corrected quantum computer.
 
In this talk, I will provide a brief introduction to the trapped-ion architecture, showcase some high profile results in quantum simulation and computation, including the only demonstration so-far of active quantum error correction. I will then focus on the scaling aspect, which is at the core of our groups mission at PSI, where we investigate integrated photonics for light delivery and modulation.

BIO: Cornelius Hempel leads the Ion Trap Quantum Computation team at the ETH Zürich-PSI Quantum Computing Hub located at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). He obtained his PhD in Physics in the group of Prof. Rainer Blatt at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) in 2014 and previously Masters and Diplom degrees at the University of Michigan (USA) and Martin Luther University Halle (Germany). Following a short postdoc at the Institut for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), he moved to the University of Sydney (Australia) as a Research Fellow in 2016 and in 2018 became principal investigator in the ytterbium laboratory of the Quantum Control Laboratory. He was promoted to Senior Research Fellow (equivalent to research associate professor in the US) in 2020. He continues to hold an honorary position in Australia since his move to Switzerland in 2021.