Welcome to the 75th episode of the Decode Quantum podcast. In our series of three episodes recorded in Lindau where dozens of physics Nobel laureates were gathered with young scientists, we had a chance to meet David Wineland.

 

This podcast was recorded on July 1st, 2024, in Lindau, Germany during the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.

David Wineland is an American physicist currently at the University of Oregon who is specialized in atomic physics, and in particular, uses laser-cooled trapped ions to implement the elements of quantum-computing. He became a laureate of the Nobel prize in physics in 2012 along with Serge Haroche of Ecole Normale Supérieure and Collège de France, Paris. He received his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1970 on a topic we’ll see later in our discussion. He was then a post-doc at the University of Washington where he worked on electrons in ion traps. In 1975, he joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) where he created a group working on ion storage and was also an academic at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He and his colleagues were among the first {laser cooling was demonstrated at the same time by the group of Peter Toschek in Heidelberg} to laser-cool ions in 1978 and then demonstrated other optical techniques to control ions and implement the first two-qubit logic gate in 1995. He and colleagues also worked on the creation of the most precise atomic clock using quantum logic on a single aluminum ion in 2019. The 2005 experiment was the first demonstration of quantum-logic spectroscopy. The most precise quantum logic clock using an Al+ (aluminum) ion was demonstrated in 2019. This work later contributed to the creation of trapped ion quantum computers from the companies IonQ and Quantinuum.

 

The transcript from the podcast published on Olivier Ezratty’s website has been edited by David Wineland and Olivier Ezratty. It is slightly different from the podcast audio recording to clarify the discussion content.