Daniel Lidar of the University of Southern California is funded by an ICC award from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry program to engage in a theoretical/experimental collaboration for the purpose of developing enabling tools for quantum information processing. Lidar is the theorist while the experimental portion of the work is carried out by Dieter Suter of the Technical University of Dortmund, a solid nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopist funded by the DFG for this research. In the context of NMR, they are investigating one of the toughest problems facing quantum technologies: that of maintaining quantum coherence in the presence of the inevitable interaction of any quantum system with its environment. This process leads to decoherence, which effectively robs a quantum system of its quantumness. Lidar and Suter are investigating the question whether one can maintain quantum coherence for arbitrarily long times. Their approach is to apply "dynamical decoupling" pulse sequences, i.e., pulse sequences designed to refocus or decouple the interaction between the quantum system and its environment. This idea is closely related to the spin-echo effect, but here the investigators consider a much more general and robust approach, aimed at arbitrarily long coherence preservation.
Underpinning quantum technologies is a new quantum science, that aims to control matter at the microscopic level where quantum effects are dominant. This ability to control the quantum state of matter has the potential to take us beyond the point where Moore's Law for the exponential growth in computer processing speeds comes to an end in 10-20 years.
The proposal was submitted in response to solicitation NSF 08-602: International Collaboration in Chemistry between US Investigators and their Counterparts Abroad (ICC). The NSF and the partnering international funding agency co-reviewed and made a joint funding decision on this proposal. NSF supports the research of the U.S. investigators while the DFG supports the research of the collaborating foreign investigator.
