Modeling a four-wave mixing scheme for trapped-atom qubit measurement

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/8p58pf45r

Abstract

At the moment, one of the most popular approaches to trapped-atom qubit measurement is measurement by resonance fluorescence, which, while relatively easy to implement, is susceptible to yielding noisy results because the measurement signal and the field used to initiate the measurement have the same frequency. A proposed alternative to this measurement scheme is that performed by a four-wave mixing (FWM) process, which would permit the measurement signal to have a frequency distinct from those used to initiate the measurement, allowing for the measurement signal to be easily filtered from other frequencies in the system and reducing measurement noise. This thesis seeks to model FWM stimulated in a trapped-atom system, then to derive from the model an expression for the efficiency of the process. To do this, we solve the wave equation of the signal field generated by FWM analytically before using Python to offer a numerical solution to the problem. The result is a set of Python scripts which can calculate the FWM efficiency and the optical power of the generated signal as a function of various system parameters, but making a conclusion on the viability of a FWM-based measurement scheme would likely involve a sophisticated optimization algorithm and knowledge of specific hardware limitations.

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