Physics

Laser-cooled trapped ions are among the most versatile experimental platforms for exploring quantum information. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of this system and its capabilities to simulate non-trivial interacting quantum models. Internal states of these ions, such as hyperfine states, constitute well isolated qubit (or spin-1/2) states, with quantum coherence demonstrated up to fifteen minutes. Individual qubits states can be detected by laser beams with near perfection. Quantum logic gates and interacting spin Hamiltonians are engineered by coupling internal states of multiple ions to their collective vibrational modes using optical forces. By suitably tailoring these spin-phonon couplings, interactions between ion-spins can be tuned in magnitude, range, and sign. The laboratory for Quantum Information with Trapped Ions at IQC aims to build a highly flexible quantum simulator with dozens of spins, and explore problems in quantum information and many-body physics in a regime that is intractable with classical computers.

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2012 was a watershed in particle physics. Its existence focuses attention on the outstanding questions about physics beyond the Standard Model: is `empty' space unstable? what is the dark matter? what is the origin of matter? what is the explanation for the small masses of the neutrinos? how is the hierarchy of mass scales in physics established and stabilized? what drove inflation? how to quantize gravity Many of these issues will be addressed by future runs of the LHC, e.g., by studies of the Higgs boson, and also motivate possible future colliders.

Confomal transformations and conformal algebras in D=2 Recap Lecture Six