Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, January 26, 2009 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Stephen Lyon
"Memoirs of a Silicon Qubit – Beating Decoherence for Solid State Quantum Computing"
ABSTRACT -- Candidate physical systems for quantum computing must satisfy a set of difficult and conflicting requirements. One needs a large number of interacting quantum 2-level systems whose mutual interactions are tightly controlled, while no interactions are allowed with anything else (decoherence). Solid state approaches are often plagued by short quantum coherence - nano or microseconds – because there are too many other states with which to interact. I will discuss recent work where we have used the spin of electrons bound to phosphorus donors in highly enriched 28Si and the phosphorus nuclei to hold quantum information. By transferring a quantum state from the electron spin to the nucleus, coherence can be maintained for seconds. This hybrid system, using the nuclei as quantum memories while interactions and gating proceeds through the electrons is a powerful model for overcoming decoherence in a solid state quantum computer.
SPEAKER -- Dr. Stephen Lyon has been teaching electrical engineering at Princeton University for the past 30 years. His research interests include silicon and III-V semiconductor devices, optical processes in semiconductors, picosecond and femtosecond phenomena, and quantum information processing.
He was born in Washington, DC. He has a BS in Engineering Physics from Cornell University along with an MS and PhD in Applied Physics from CalTech.
He is a member of Sigma Xi, the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the Electrochemical Society.