Adiabatic Passage through Space: Robust coherent transport in solid-state systems

Research Fellow, Centre for Quantum Computer Technology.
School of Physics, The University of Melbourne.

Friday 31^st March 2006, 3.30PM, Seminar Room AR103, Graduate Research Centre.

Stimulated Raman Passage (STIRAP) is a well-known technique for transferring population between atomic energy levels in a three-state system. The hall mark of this technique are its robustness and the surprising mechanism for population transfer where the enabling pulses are applied in the counter-intuitive direction, and the population is only ever found in the ends of the chain (never in the intervening state). We have found that the new possibilities for quantum coherence in solid-state systems, allow us to consider performing a STIRAP like protocol on spatial states. We call this new procedure CTAP (Coherent Tunneling Adiabatic Passage). Like STIRAP, this new transfer protocol is extremely robust, and in a triple dot arrangement, the population can be taken from the left dot, to the right dot, without ever populating the central dot (even transiently). Construction of quantum systems with spatial degrees of freedom allow higher order protocols to be developed, and we have determined protocols involving transport through long chains, and to multiple recipients for distributed entanglement generation, and operator measurement QC. We have also formulated a new quasi-2D architecture incorporating CTAP transport rails that may find use in constructing defect-tolerant quantum computers. This talk will review STIRAP and CTAP, and then discuss its applications to quantum transport and quantum computing.

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