A Rydberg Quantum Simulator
A universal quantum
would be something quite useful to have, as it allows to simulate the
behavior of any quantum-mechanical system efficiently. We have been
able to show that one can build such a device with strongly
reported in our paper having just appeared in Nature
The nice thing about highly excited Rydberg atoms is that they
interact very strongly, and it is possible to switch these
interactions on and off in a controlled way by applying laser
pulses. By choosing the atoms where you shine laser light on you can
precisely tune the properties of the quantum simulator. Furthermore,
the technique can also be used for a novel cooling technique, allowing
to create exotic quantum phases such as a spin
To add even more advertizing, the numerical simulations for the paper
were done with libquantum, your
author's favorite library for performing quantum simulations.
Reference: H. Weimer, M. Müller, I. Lesanovsky, P.
Zoller, H. P. Büchler. A Rydberg Quantum Simulator, Nature
Physics, doi:10.1038/NPHYS1614 (2010)
Copyright 2006--2011 Hendrik Weimer. This document is available under
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