Controlling atom-atom interactions in optical lattices

Optical lattices provide new opportunities to create entangled states of neutral atoms for quantum information processing.1,2 Such systems has some attractive features: decoherence is suppressed because neutrals couple weakly to the environment, and operations can be performed in parallel on a large ensemble of trapped atoms, thus offering avenues for scaling to many qubits. The main source of decoherence is spontaneous emission, but this can be negligible if all manipulations are performed rapidly compared to the photon scattering rate. We consider here the possibility of using resonantly induced electric dipole-dipole interactions to engineer two-qubit operations1 such as the “swap gate” and the “controlled-phase” which, together with single qubit operations, can perform arbitrary quantum computations.