Linke Research Group

A collaboration between researchers at JQI and North Carolina State University has developed a new method that uses a quantum computer to measure the thermodynamic properties of a system. The team shared the new approach in a paper published August 18, 2021, in the journal Science Advances.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $1 million to a multi-institutional team led by JQI Fellow Edo Waks, who is also a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maryland (UMD) and associate director of the Quantum Technology Center (QTC); JQI Fellow Norbert Linke, who is also an assistant professor of physics at UMD and a QTC Fellow; Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX) Executive Director Tripti Sinha; and co-PI’s Dirk Englund of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Saikat Guha of the University of Arizona, to help develop quantum interconnects for ion trap quantum computers, which are currently some of the most scalable quantum computers available.

Research by a team that includes JQI Fellow Norbert Linke, UMD physics graduate student Nhung Hong Nguyen, and visiting graduate student Cinthia Huerta Alderete has been selected as one of the 2019 Top Picks in Computer Architecture by IEEE Micro. The work, compared different kinds of quantum computers. 

JQI has named four new Fellows in 2019, bringing the total number to 35. All four of the new arrivals have appointments in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. One Fellow is also a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMD and another is a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) have been steadily improving the performance of ion trap systems, a leading platform for future quantum computers. Now, a team of researchers led by JQI Fellows Norbert Linke and Christopher Monroe has performed a key experiment on five ion-based quantum bits, or qubits. They used laser pulses to simultaneously create quantum connections between different pairs of qubits—the first time these kinds of parallel operations have been executed in an ion trap. The new study, which is a critical step toward large-scale quantum computation, was published on July 24 in the journal Nature.    

The University of Maryland will host the 2nd North American Conference on Trapped Ions (NACTI) from July 22-26. This year’s conference comes two years after the inaugural meeting, which was held on the Boulder, Colorado campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). More than 230 students and researchers from around the globe, all working on the science of trapped atomic ions, will attend five days of sessions at the Edward St. John Learning & Teaching Center on campus at UMD.

Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute have implemented an experimental test for quantum scrambling, a chaotic shuffling of the information stored among a collection of quantum particles. Their experiments on a group of seven atomic ions, reported in the March 7 issue of Nature, demonstrate a new way to distinguish between scrambling—which maintains the amount of information in a quantum system but mixes it up—and true information loss. The protocol may one day help verify the calculations of quantum computers, which harness the rules of quantum physics to process information in novel ways.