Summer research leads to undergraduate publication

Posted in News Story

Research work conducted by Mike McAneny (C’14), Bryce Yoshimura (graduate student) and Prof. Freericks has been published in Physical Review A, the premier journal for atomic molecular and optical physics. Mike worked on a problem related to constructing a large quantum computer from ions trapped in a Penning trap, based on an experiment being done at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Boulder, CO, and in the group of recent Nobel prize winner David Wineland. Mike examined the effects that defects have on the experiment. The defects occur because water molecules collide with the trapped beryllium ions and replace the beryllium by beryllium hydride. The main conclusion of the work was that these defects provide relatively small effects on the properties of these quantum computers, as long as they are properly accounted for in the way the experiment is run. The full article is available at Doi: 10.1103/PhysRevA.88.043434. Mike is continuing his work on related problems for his senior thesis.