Quantum Information Processing with Ultracold Atomic Qubits - Ivan Deutsch

The end of the twentieth century saw the coming together of two of its greatest intellectual achievements -- digital information processing and quantum mechanics. What lies ahead of Moore\'s road map of ever shrinking microprocessor components is not just a tinier version of devises where switches open and close valves for classical currents, but a broad new principle based on quantum superpositions and nonlocal entanglement. In this colloquium I will review the basic principles of quantum information processing and attempts to brings these ideas to fruition in the laboratory. A particularly promising scheme employs some of the coolest matter around -- the optical lattice -- neutral atoms trapped in a virtual crystal of light.