SBIR Phase I: Spatially Modulated Light For Trapping And Addressing Of Alkaline-Earth Neutral Atom Qubits

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will result from the development of quantum computers that will impact many technologies by enabling, for example, molecular simulations for drug design and catalyst development for energy applications, quantum machine learning, and solving optimization problems such as scheduling. Scalable, universal quantum computing promises to be one of the most transformative technologies of the modern era. The range of applications are broad and will only expand with the development of new quantum algorithms, with one of the biggest opportunities being molecular simulations for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. For example, despite being a multi-billion dollar industry, computational drug discovery is limited by the approximations necessary to make calculations tractable for classical computers. In order to perform these simulations at a scale useful for commercial applications, qubit numbers must be increased several orders of magnitude beyond the state of the art. The proposed innovation of trapping and individual control of neutral atoms will, if successful, enable quantum computers to scale to the thousands of qubits needed for error-corrected, universal quantum computing. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop technology for scalable trapping and addressing of neutral atom qubits through dynamic, parallelized optical trapping and individual addressing of alkaline earth qubits. Neutral atoms are an emerging platform for quantum computing and the majority of work thus far has been directed towards alkali atoms (i.e., those with a single valence electron). Alkaline earth atoms have two valence electrons and correspondingly a richer energy level structure, which has demonstrated very long trapped coherence times. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.