We provide a broad outline of the requirements that should be met by components produced for a Quantum Information Technology (QIT) industry, and we identify electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) as potentially key enabling science toward the goal of providing widely available few-qubit quantum information processing within the next decade. As a concrete example, we build on earlier work and discuss the implementation of a two-photon controlled phase gate and a one-photon phase gate using the approximate Kerr nonlinearity provided by EIT. We rigorously the dependence of the performance of these gates on atomic dephasing and field detuning and intensity, and we calculate the optimum parameters needed to apply a pi phase shift in a gate of a given fidelity. Although high-fidelity gate operation will be difficult to achieve with realistic system dephasing rates, the moderate fidelities that we believe will be needed for few-qubit QIT seem much more obtainable.
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