Dr. Nelson Darkwah Oppong - LMU Munich
1. Briefly describe your current position, research focus, and your role within MCQST.
I am a postdoc on Prof. Aidelsburger's synthetic-quantum-matter experiment. As part of a larger team, I do experimental research on ultracold ytterbium quantum gases in a laboratory located at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
2. What opportunities are in your new seed funding project?
Within the MCQST seed funding project, we plan to explore the implementation of a collisional two-qubit gate for ultracold ytterbium atoms in an optical lattice. Two-qubit gates are fundamental building blocks for quantum computers and lie at the heart of more complex quantum algorithms.
Our proposed experiments would only present a very first step towards employing ultracold ytterbium atoms for quantum computation. Nevertheless, our envisioned implementation is promising since it targets the nuclear spin of ytterbium, both for the storage of quantum information and the interaction between different qubits. Compared to other qubit implementations, the nuclear spin is particularly robust against external perturbations, addressing one of the central challenges in quantum computation experiments.
3. Do you have any special/unique holiday traditions?
During the holidays, I usually just spend time with my family and enjoy a couple of long-distance runs with my dad.