Blumenthal & OCAQπ Group "Shrinking of large lasers & ..." ECE Prof. Daniel Blumenthal's OCAQπ Group demonstrate integrated stabilized laser chips performing clock and quantum operations on a room temperature trapped ion qubit From The UCSB Current article "Researchers demonstrate integrated stabilized laser chips performing clock and quantum operations on a room temperature trapped ion qubit" In an ongoing effort to bring quantum science out of the tightly controlled lab environment and into the field, researchers from UC Santa Barbara and the University of Massachusetts Amherst have, for the first time, demonstrated a chip-scale, stabilized, visible light laser that drives a trapped ion atomic optical clock and quantum qubit, paving the way toward compact, portable and scalable trapped-ion quantum information systems. “This work is foundational in that we demonstrated that chip-scale integrated photonic stabilized lasers can be used to connect precision light to one of the narrowest atomic optical transitions that people work with, with the trapped ion itself created on a surface trap chip operating at room temperature,” said Daniel Blumenthal, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UCSB and a senior author of a paper published in Nature Communications. Miniaturization is the name of the game for Blumenthal’s research group, which is working to shrink what are normally large lasers and optical components and often room-sized quantum optical light-matter experiments, down to about the size of a deck of cards. The traditional lasers and other components that power these experiments typically occupy 90% of the setup on table-tops and equipment racks that require hand-tuning and are very susceptible to environmental disturbances. In scaling these components down to the chip and providing room temperature operation, it becomes possible to bring the power and precision of quantum measurement, sensing and computation to more researchers and to a wider variety