CONQUEST is a Marie Curie Research Network Training Project:
http://mc-opportunities.cordis.lu/show-PRJ.cfm?obj_id=4495

The project CONQUEST is designed to break new grounds at the crossing point of two very active domains of scientific and technological research, which have made considerable progresses in the past few years:

• the controlled manipualtion of individual quantum objects, such as atoms, ions or photons, at the very level of their quantum state, which includes both internal and external degrees of freedom;
• the possibility of using such systems for exploring further the rapidly growing domain of encoding and processing information at the quantum level.

The main goal of this project is to improve and to build upon the controlled engineering of the quantum state of physical systems made of small sets of trapped particles. This will be done by gathering and building upon the best experimental and theoretical methods which are presently available. The central scientific challenges of the project are:

• to achieve a deterministic preparation of states of individual objects, such as neutral atoms, ions or photons
• to perform a coherent control of dynamics of individual quantum objects
• to control interactions between individual quantum systems
• to improve our understanding of fundamental quantum phenomena, such as nonlocality and decoherence, essential to understand the power and limitations of quantum information processing

The benefits expected are twofold:

• physics of fully coherent control of quantum state of sets of trapped particles, especially of the entanglement, which has the most peculiar quantum features
• this new physics lies at the core of the presently most advanced, and foreseeably most promising, schemes for quantum informaiton processing

The research in the network will be used as a training vehicle for early-stage and experienced researchers in 8 European institutions in 13 research groups (both theoretical and experimental).