Trapped-ion technologies stand out as leading contenders in the pursuit of quantum computing, due to their capacity for highly entangled qubits. Among many proposed trapped-ion architectures, the “drive-through” architecture has drawn increasing attention, notably for its remarkable ability to minimize heat generation, which is crucial for low-temperature operation and thermal noise reduction, thus reliable quantum computation. We present the first compilation system tailored for the drive-through architecture to achieve high-fidelity computation for intended quantum programs. Our approach accommodates the unique features of the new architecture that utilize transport gates to facilitate direct entanglement between static qubits and communication qubits. We optimize the qubit placement that changes over time for each trap, considering the cost of qubit swapping. Our method strategically balances the gate and swap distances, significantly improving the overall fidelity across various benchmarks.
We demonstrate Floquet engineering in a basic yet scalable 2D architecture of individually trapped and controlled ions. Local parametric modulations of detuned trapping potentials steer the strength of long-range interion couplings and the related Peierls phase of the motional state. In our proof of principle, we initialize large coherent states and tune modulation parameters to control trajectories, directions, and interferences of the phonon flow. Our findings open a new pathway for future Floquet-based trapped-ion quantum simulators targeting correlated topological phenomena and dynamical gauge fields.
We propose a scalable ion trap architecture for universal quantum computation, which is composed of an array of ion traps with one ion confined in each trap. The neighboring traps are designed capable of merging into one single trap. The universal two-qubit SWAP gate is realized by direct collision of two neighboring ions in the merged trap, which induces an effective spin-spin interaction between two ions. We find that the collision-induced spin-spin interaction decreases with the third power of two ions' trapping distance. Even with a 200μm trapping distance between atomic ions in Paul traps, it is still possible to realize a two-qubit gate operation with speed in 0.1kHz regime. The speed can be further increased up into 0.1MHz regime using electrons with 10mm trapping distance in Penning traps.