Jonathan Home

Atheist, Educator/Teacher, Engineer, Idea generator, Inventor, Musician, Parent, Scientist, Technologist

Born in Newcastle, UK, I grew up playing the violin and football (every break at school).I spent lots of time in my teenage years playing in orchestras, with highlights including playing concertos with local orchestras and later moving into chamber music. I chose to study physics at university in order to make best use of my favourite (and least demanding) school subject, which for me was maths. In Oxford, my interest in the subject blossomed, and chose to continue with a PhD in Oxford with Andrew Steane, working on quantum computation with trapped ions - strings of individual atoms where a quantum bit of information is stored in each and every one. Here I found the connection to experiments inspirational and continually humbling (experiments have a way of "catching you out" every day). Following my PhD, I won a Lindemann Fellowship from the English Speaking Union, allowing me to move as a post-doctoral fellowship to NIST Boulder to work with David Wineland. During 4 years in Dave's research group, I demonstrated the first system capable of performing all the fundamental elements required for a large scale quantum computer, using this to demonstrate that it could be programmed to perform any operation possible. This lays the basis for large-scale quantum computation with ions. Many technical elements of quantum computers are concerned with exploring large quantum states - we applied this to realize the first quantum correlated ("entangled") state of two mechanical oscillators. In 2010, I took up a position at ETH Zurich as an Assistant Professor, and have since built up a research groups with 3 cutting edge experiments, each with unique technical capabilities. My students recently demonstrated for the first time the use of damping to robustly produce special quantum states which constrain the particle below the classical limits, which allowed us to also generate the largest states of a type closely related to the famed "Schrodinger's cat" though experiment. We demonstrated a new method of performing quantum logic gates using active ion transport, providing new opportunities for scaling these systems. In another system, fast CMOS switches have been integrated close to the ion trap, potentially increasing control speed, and we have also developed traps for individual atoms fabricated from optical fibres, with a unique geometry. For the latter, I was awarded the Young Researcher Award of the University of Erlangen Nuremberg in 2013..

Quantum mechanics, physics, computation, the way people think and learn, my wife and son, hiking in the mountains, violin music,

Trapped atomic ions provide quantum systems which can be controlled with fantastic precision. For a computer based on these systems we need new technologies for integrating optics and producing trapping structures at new length scales. This would allow experimental explorations of quantum mechanics beyond the boundaries at which computers could calculate the results. Since this is unexplored by exact calculations and by experiments this takes us in a new realm, and we expect to make new connections between the fundamental interactions (which we control in the experiments), and the resulting behaviour of the collective system. This could lead to new materials, functionality, and shed light on the fundamental nature of quantum mechanics and its relation to our familiar experiences of physics in the macroscopic world.

Physics - Atomic and Molecular

I became a TED fellow in 2015, and am looking forward to meeting interesting people at TED.

I used to play the violin before my son was born.