The following content has been provided by the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Well first, thank you to the SAOT. It's really a great honour to receive this award and I'm very much looking forward to the collaborations that come over the next few years.

Also I should say thank you to the university. It's going to be very interesting to spend time in Erlangen and I'm looking forward to time spent here.

And thirdly I wanted to say thanks to Dave for coming here and talking because it's a great pleasure always to see Dave.

It was really a great pleasure working in his lab for many years.

And also it's sort of one of those things as a young group that you do to tell your students that when you make a major result that you've got to some year in Dave's progression through science, if you like.

So I told them back in December that they were at 1980 and now we're at 1989 I realize.

So we're sort of edging forwards but we have a long way to go to get to Dave's current day.

So it's very exciting to have him here talking.

So Professor Lopert invited me to tell you a bit about what we're planning to do in the next few years in the collaboration in Erlangen and with me spending time in Erlangen.

And it's an exciting thing that sort of started up over the last couple of years from a visit that Philip Russell made.

So Philip Russell is in the Max Planck Institute here in Erlangen to our group at ETH.

He was giving a colloquium on the topic of photonic crystal fibers.

And of course Philip Russell is really one of the founders of this field.

He made some of the first photonic crystal fibers and his group still plays a very active role in this field.

And the exciting thing that happened was I was telling him a bit of stuff about ion traps and how we build them and what we do.

And Philip said that in effect that he felt that he could make some of the sort of structures that we might need.

And so looking this sort of an exciting opportunity because it brings some very novel technologies,

stuff that's commonly used in optics into the realm of ion traps and I think offers some new possibilities

for types of quantum control that we might be able to achieve.

And so I will try and tell you some about some of those today.

So what you see in this right hand picture, well in the left hand picture here you see what a photonic crystal fiber is.

These holes are typically on the sort of 100 nanometer or so scale and they form a pattern of structure if you like

where light travels a bit faster or travels a bit slower whether it's in the hole or it's in some glass.

And what this does is it really blocks the light in this particular pattern.

It blocks the light so it just travels along the core of this fiber.

But for me looking at this then it looks like a large array of holes and that's a sort of interesting starting point.

The real key is that we're thinking about how to push gold through these holes.

And this is the first attempt that we've made in the lab at ETH.

And this is really taking quite a big structure but of this sort and pushing wires through the holes and then planering it down.

And the idea is that by applying voltages to the opposite end of these wires we can form a trap above for individual ions,

form a trap above the plane of these electrodes here.

And so there's some, I think this has a sort of unique geometry in the types of traps we make in ion trap physics

and hopefully I can share with you some of the possibilities that may come from that.

So just to motivate it a bit, so my career has mainly been spent in quantum computation work

and I want to in a sense put you in context of where ion traps are and what we do and how we build these different systems.

So one of the key things in quantum computation at the moment,

you saw that Dave told you about the sort of ultra-high precision of trapped ions and the control of the quantum states.

And in general the highest precision control that is found is in fairly large structured traps.

So here you see an ion trap that's actually machined steel and the ions, this is sort of on the several millimetre scale

and the ions sit in this slot here. This is a trap from Reiner Blatz group in Innsbruck.

So here's actually a picture of some ions from our ETH group, some beryllium ions that we trapped a few weeks ago.

But the key thing here, and you should notice that this trap is really quite big,

and one of the things that we're thinking about today is how we go from small systems of ions up to sort of 10 or so ions in a trap like this

to systems of maybe 100,000 ions that would really realize something like a computer.

And in that sense then just piling more and more ions into a trap like this is sort of not seen to be a good way to go for a number of reasons.

But the key component in a computer is that you transport information as well as doing processing on it.

So in addition to being able to manipulate these things very precisely, in a quantum computer you want to be able to move information around.

And there you have to move quantum particles around.

So the work I was involved in in Dave's lab in fact was with a trap not dissimilar to this. This is actually one we've built at ETH.