MilestoneHardwareConfirmed
NIST team demonstrates a quantum logic gate with a single trapped ion
Dec 18, 1995
Chris Monroe, David Wineland and colleagues at NIST in Boulder, Colorado, run a controlled-NOT gate, the basic two-qubit operation, on a single laser-cooled beryllium ion, storing one qubit in its internal state and one in its motion. NIST describes it as the first quantum logic gate.
Why it matters
Logic gates are the building blocks of computers. The work fed into Wineland's share of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics, cited in part for "the very first steps" toward a quantum computer.
Chris Monroe · David Wineland · NIST
Related
Sources (4)
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Physical Review Letters
Demonstration of a Fundamental Quantum Logic Gate
“We demonstrate the operation of a two-bit "controlled-NOT" quantum logic gate, which, in conjunction with simple single-bit operations, forms a universal quantum logic gate for quantum computation.”
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NIST (publication record)
Demonstration of a Fundamental Universal Quantum Logic Gate
“The two quantum bits are stored in the internal and external degrees of freedom of a single trapped atom, which is first laser cooled to the zero-point energy.”
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NIST (Taking Measure blog)
How NIST Helped Start an Industry: Our Role in Jump-Starting Quantum Information Science
“Wineland shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics “for ground-breaking experimental methods” that included “the very first steps towards building a new type of super-fast computer, based on quantum physics.””
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NIST
NIST Physicist David Wineland to Share 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics
“In 1995, Wineland's research group demonstrated the first "universal quantum logic gate" using a single trapped ion (charged atom), an experiment proposed earlier that year by Cirac and Zoller.”
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