Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:1902.03469 · Optics Express

Efficient ion-photon qubit SWAP gate in realistic ion cavity-QED systems without strong coupling

Adrien Borne, Tracy E. Northup, R. Blatt, Barak Dayan

Published Mar 16, 2020• 12 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

ions. The gate can also serve as a single-photon quantum memory, in which an outgoing photon heralds the successful arrival of the incoming photonic qubit. Although strong coupling, namely having the single-photon Rabi frequency be the fastest rate in the system, is often assumed essential, this gate (similarly to the Duan-Kimble C-phase gate) requires only Purcell enhancement, i.e. high single-atom cooperativity. Accordingly, it does not require small mode volume cavities, which are challenging to incorporate with ions due to the difficulty of trapping them close to dielectric surfaces. Instead, larger cavities, potentially more compatible with the trap apparatus, are sufficient, as long as their numerical aperture is high enough to maintain small mode area at the ion's position. We define the optimal parameters for the gate's operation and simulate the expected fidelities and efficiencies, demonstrating that efficient photon-ion qubit exchange, a valuable building block for scalable quantum computation, is practically attainable with current experimental capabilities.

DOI
10.1364/oe.376914

Related papers

Enhanced Light Collection from Single Trapped Ions.

Jonathan David Sterk

Long-range transport of quantum information across a network is most readily achieved through the use of photons as the information carriers. The nodes of such a quantum network are most naturally a quantum memory or information processor, which typically do not rely upon photonic qubits. Realizing a large-scale distributed quantum network therefore requires an efficient interface between the two physical manifestations of the quantum information. The most promising platform for realizing a quantum computer is the manipulation of trapped atomic ions, as this system has demonstrated all the fundamental requirements to realize a quantum computer. Additionally, trapped ions posses long coherence times necessary for quantum memories. The interface between atomic and photonic qubits relies on a high photon emission rate into the collected solid angle. Most methods of photon collection for quantum networks use a high numerical aperture microscope objective, which only collects on the order of 1% of all the emitted photons. This results in a small probability of successfully linking two quantum nodes. In this work, I present the design, simulation, and implementation of a trapped ion cavity QED system capable of improving the photon collection efficiency. A single ytterbium ion is coupled to a high-finesse optical cavity. The photon scatter rate into the cavity mode is enhanced by a factor of 130 over the free-space scatter rate into the cavity solid angle. This represents the first step towards realizing a protocol to entangle the polarization of an emitted photon to the Zeeman sublevels of the ion with high photon collection efficiency. Simulations of the experimental system indicate that with an optical cavity up to 4% of the light emitted by the ion can be collected.

•Jan 1, 2011•1 citation

A scheme for quantum logic gate based on coherent-state qubits in cavity QED system

Shi-Qing Tang, Shunlong Luo, Jiayi Xu

A two-qubit quantum swap gate scheme based on coherent state qubit is proposed in cavity quantum electrodynamics system. Our scheme adopt the interaction between the Λ-type atomic ensemble and the two-mode optical cavity, and the swap gate can be realized directly only one step, so as to save a lot of quantum resources and reduce the number of single qubit rotation operations in the actual quantum information processing. It is found that under the condition of large detuning limit, the excited states of atoms are adiabatically eliminated, and the decoherence caused by the spontaneous emission of atoms is effectively suppressed. All atoms in the optical cavity are universally addressed, which reduces the experimental operation difficulty of the scheme. The fidelity of the quantum logic gate is maintained at a very high level when the photon loss of the cavity field is considered. Compared with the single-atom scheme, it is found that the atom-cavity interaction time required by the atomic ensemble scheme is inversely proportional to the number of atoms, so that the speed of the quantum logic gate can be increased by N times. Therefore, in principle, as long as enough atoms interacting with the optical field, an effective coupling of any atom-cavity field can be generated, which is conducive to selecting the appropriate quantum gate operation time in practical operation and effectively avoiding decoherence.

SPIE Conference on Quantum and Nonlinear Optics•Nov 8, 2021•0 citations

Fibre-tip microcavities for enhanced ion-photon coupling in scalable quantum information networks

Péter Horák, Nina Podoliak, Hiroki Takahashi +1 more

Scalable quantum information processing requires efficient coupling between stationary qubits (trapped atoms, ions, NV centres, etc.) via “flying” single-photon qubits. Here we investigate the optimisation and integration of fibre-tip microcavities into radiofrequency ion traps to achieve (i) high-fidelity transfer of ion qubits onto single photons, (ii) low-loss coupling of cavity photons into single-mode optical fibre, and (iii) achieving conditions (i) and (ii) without disturbing the ion trap. Our cavities are fabricated by laser micro-machining the ends of optical fibres and subsequent coating with a thin dielectric mirror, giving rise to cavity mirrors with a Gaussian profile. These cavities allow for small mode volume and thus large ion-photon coupling fulfilling requirement (i), while simultaneously providing intrinsic coupling to optical fibres, requirement (ii), as long as mode matching between the cavity mode and the fibre mode can be achieved at the cavity mirror. Using a semi-analytical numerical method, we show that Gaussian-shaped mirrors can in fact be used to enhance ion-photon coupling beyond what is possible with more common spherical cavity mirrors. Ion traps are notoriously sensitive to the presence of dielectric materials such as cavity mirrors near the trap centre, preventing requirement (iii) from being achieved. We performed an extensive numerical study of five different common ion traps to find the optimum configurations for integrating fibre-tip cavities with minimised effects on the trapping potentials. We discuss these results and present simple and effective design rules for realising optimum ion-cavity based quantum networks.

•Sep 20, 2016•0 citations

High-dimensional two-photon quantum controlled phase-flip gate

Mingyuan Chen, Jiang-Shan Tang, Miao Cai +3 more

High-dimensional quantum systems have been used to reveal interesting fundamental physics and to improve information capacity and noise resilience in quantum information processing. However, it remains a significant challenge to realize universal two-photon quantum gates in high dimensions with high success probability. Here, by considering an ion-cavity QED system, we theoretically propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first high-dimensional, deterministic, and universal two-photon quantum gate. By using an optical cavity embedded with a single trapped Ca + 40 ion, we achieve a high average fidelity larger than 98% for a quantum controlled phase-flip gate in four-dimensional space, spanned by photonic spin angular momenta and orbital angular momenta. Our proposed system can be an essential building block for high-dimensional quantum information processing, and also provides a platform for studying high-dimensional cavity QED. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

arXiv:2404.14673•Physical Review Research•Jul 1, 2024•7 citations

Efficient optical configurations for trapped-ion entangling gates

Aditya Milind Kolhatkar, Karan K. Mehta

High-fidelity and parallel realization in scalable platforms of the two-qubit entangling gates fundamental to universal quantum computing constitutes one of the largest challenges in implementing fault-tolerant quantum computation. Integrated optical addressing of trapped-ion qubits offers routes to scaling the high-fidelity optical control demonstrated to date in small systems. Here we show that in addition to scaling, capabilities practically enabled by integrated optics can substantially alleviate laser powers required for both light-shift (LS) and Molmer-Sorensen (MS) geometric phase gates acting on long-lived ground-state qubit encodings in a broad range of ion species. In the proposed gate schemes utilizing carrier nulling via ion positioning at phase-stable standing-wave (SW) nodes, our calculations suggest that suppressed spontaneous photon scattering at the SW node allows for gate drives operating at smaller Raman detunings, resulting in approximately an order-of-magnitude reduction in power requirement (and significantly larger in certain parameter regimes) for gates of a given duration and scattering-limited fidelity as compared to conventional running wave (RW)-based approaches. The SW schemes have the additional benefit of simultaneously eliminating undesired coherent couplings that typically limit gate speeds. Our work quantifies power requirements for multiple ion species and enhancements to be expected from carrier-nulled configurations practically enabled by integrated delivery, and informs experiments and systems for realization of fast and power-efficient laser-based entangling gates in scalable platforms.

arXiv:2509.05271•Physical Review A•Feb 12, 2026•2 citations

Quantum repeaters based on single trapped ions

Nicolas Sangouard, Romain Dubessy, Christoph Simon

We analyze the performance of a quantum repeater protocol based on single trapped ions. At each node, single trapped ions embedded into high-finesse cavities emit single photons whose polarization is entangled with the ion state. A specific detection of two photons at a central station located half-way between two nodes heralds the entanglement of two remote ions. Entanglement can be extended to long distances by applying successive entanglement swapping operations based on two-ion gate operations that have already been demonstrated experimentally with high precision. Our calculation shows that the distribution rate of entanglement achievable with such an ion-based quantum repeater protocol is higher by orders of magnitude than the rates that are achievable with the best known schemes based on atomic-ensemble memories and linear optics. The main reason is that for trapped ions the entanglement swapping operations are performed deterministically, in contrast to success probabilities below 50% per swapping with linear optics. The scheme requires efficient collection of the emitted photons, which can be achieved with cavities, and efficient conversion of their wavelength, which can be done via stimulated parametric down-conversion. We also suggest how to realize temporal multiplexing, which offers additional significant speed ups in entanglement distribution, with trapped ions.

arXiv:0902.3127•Physical Review A•Apr 29, 2009•144 citations
ions. The gate can also serve as a single-photon quantum memory, in which an outgoing photon heralds the successful arrival of the incoming photonic qubit. Although strong coupling, namely having the single-photon Rabi frequency be the fastest rate in the system, is often assumed essential, this gate (similarly to the Duan-Kimble C-phase gate) requires only Purcell enhancement, i.e. high single-atom cooperativity. Accordingly, it does not require small mode volume cavities, which are challenging to incorporate with ions due to the difficulty of trapping them close to dielectric surfaces. Instead, larger cavities, potentially more compatible with the trap apparatus, are sufficient, as long as their numerical aperture is high enough to maintain small mode area at the ion's position. We define the optimal parameters for the gate's operation and simulate the expected fidelities and efficiencies, demonstrating that efficient photon-ion qubit exchange, a valuable building block for scalable quantum computation, is practically attainable with current experimental capabilities.
Long-range transport of quantum information across a network is most readily achieved through the use of photons as the information carriers. The nodes of such a quantum network are most naturally a quantum memory or information processor, which typically do not rely upon photonic qubits. Realizing a large-scale distributed quantum network therefore requires an efficient interface between the two physical manifestations of the quantum information. The most promising platform for realizing a quantum computer is the manipulation of trapped atomic ions, as this system has demonstrated all the fundamental requirements to realize a quantum computer. Additionally, trapped ions posses long coherence times necessary for quantum memories. The interface between atomic and photonic qubits relies on a high photon emission rate into the collected solid angle. Most methods of photon collection for quantum networks use a high numerical aperture microscope objective, which only collects on the order of 1% of all the emitted photons. This results in a small probability of successfully linking two quantum nodes. In this work, I present the design, simulation, and implementation of a trapped ion cavity QED system capable of improving the photon collection efficiency. A single ytterbium ion is coupled to a high-finesse optical cavity. The photon scatter rate into the cavity mode is enhanced by a factor of 130 over the free-space scatter rate into the cavity solid angle. This represents the first step towards realizing a protocol to entangle the polarization of an emitted photon to the Zeeman sublevels of the ion with high photon collection efficiency. Simulations of the experimental system indicate that with an optical cavity up to 4% of the light emitted by the ion can be collected.
A two-qubit quantum swap gate scheme based on coherent state qubit is proposed in cavity quantum electrodynamics system. Our scheme adopt the interaction between the Λ-type atomic ensemble and the two-mode optical cavity, and the swap gate can be realized directly only one step, so as to save a lot of quantum resources and reduce the number of single qubit rotation operations in the actual quantum information processing. It is found that under the condition of large detuning limit, the excited states of atoms are adiabatically eliminated, and the decoherence caused by the spontaneous emission of atoms is effectively suppressed. All atoms in the optical cavity are universally addressed, which reduces the experimental operation difficulty of the scheme. The fidelity of the quantum logic gate is maintained at a very high level when the photon loss of the cavity field is considered. Compared with the single-atom scheme, it is found that the atom-cavity interaction time required by the atomic ensemble scheme is inversely proportional to the number of atoms, so that the speed of the quantum logic gate can be increased by N times. Therefore, in principle, as long as enough atoms interacting with the optical field, an effective coupling of any atom-cavity field can be generated, which is conducive to selecting the appropriate quantum gate operation time in practical operation and effectively avoiding decoherence.
Scalable quantum information processing requires efficient coupling between stationary qubits (trapped atoms, ions, NV centres, etc.) via “flying” single-photon qubits. Here we investigate the optimisation and integration of fibre-tip microcavities into radiofrequency ion traps to achieve (i) high-fidelity transfer of ion qubits onto single photons, (ii) low-loss coupling of cavity photons into single-mode optical fibre, and (iii) achieving conditions (i) and (ii) without disturbing the ion trap. Our cavities are fabricated by laser micro-machining the ends of optical fibres and subsequent coating with a thin dielectric mirror, giving rise to cavity mirrors with a Gaussian profile. These cavities allow for small mode volume and thus large ion-photon coupling fulfilling requirement (i), while simultaneously providing intrinsic coupling to optical fibres, requirement (ii), as long as mode matching between the cavity mode and the fibre mode can be achieved at the cavity mirror. Using a semi-analytical numerical method, we show that Gaussian-shaped mirrors can in fact be used to enhance ion-photon coupling beyond what is possible with more common spherical cavity mirrors. Ion traps are notoriously sensitive to the presence of dielectric materials such as cavity mirrors near the trap centre, preventing requirement (iii) from being achieved. We performed an extensive numerical study of five different common ion traps to find the optimum configurations for integrating fibre-tip cavities with minimised effects on the trapping potentials. We discuss these results and present simple and effective design rules for realising optimum ion-cavity based quantum networks.
High-dimensional quantum systems have been used to reveal interesting fundamental physics and to improve information capacity and noise resilience in quantum information processing. However, it remains a significant challenge to realize universal two-photon quantum gates in high dimensions with high success probability. Here, by considering an ion-cavity QED system, we theoretically propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first high-dimensional, deterministic, and universal two-photon quantum gate. By using an optical cavity embedded with a single trapped Ca + 40 ion, we achieve a high average fidelity larger than 98% for a quantum controlled phase-flip gate in four-dimensional space, spanned by photonic spin angular momenta and orbital angular momenta. Our proposed system can be an essential building block for high-dimensional quantum information processing, and also provides a platform for studying high-dimensional cavity QED. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
High-fidelity and parallel realization in scalable platforms of the two-qubit entangling gates fundamental to universal quantum computing constitutes one of the largest challenges in implementing fault-tolerant quantum computation. Integrated optical addressing of trapped-ion qubits offers routes to scaling the high-fidelity optical control demonstrated to date in small systems. Here we show that in addition to scaling, capabilities practically enabled by integrated optics can substantially alleviate laser powers required for both light-shift (LS) and Molmer-Sorensen (MS) geometric phase gates acting on long-lived ground-state qubit encodings in a broad range of ion species. In the proposed gate schemes utilizing carrier nulling via ion positioning at phase-stable standing-wave (SW) nodes, our calculations suggest that suppressed spontaneous photon scattering at the SW node allows for gate drives operating at smaller Raman detunings, resulting in approximately an order-of-magnitude reduction in power requirement (and significantly larger in certain parameter regimes) for gates of a given duration and scattering-limited fidelity as compared to conventional running wave (RW)-based approaches. The SW schemes have the additional benefit of simultaneously eliminating undesired coherent couplings that typically limit gate speeds. Our work quantifies power requirements for multiple ion species and enhancements to be expected from carrier-nulled configurations practically enabled by integrated delivery, and informs experiments and systems for realization of fast and power-efficient laser-based entangling gates in scalable platforms.
We analyze the performance of a quantum repeater protocol based on single trapped ions. At each node, single trapped ions embedded into high-finesse cavities emit single photons whose polarization is entangled with the ion state. A specific detection of two photons at a central station located half-way between two nodes heralds the entanglement of two remote ions. Entanglement can be extended to long distances by applying successive entanglement swapping operations based on two-ion gate operations that have already been demonstrated experimentally with high precision. Our calculation shows that the distribution rate of entanglement achievable with such an ion-based quantum repeater protocol is higher by orders of magnitude than the rates that are achievable with the best known schemes based on atomic-ensemble memories and linear optics. The main reason is that for trapped ions the entanglement swapping operations are performed deterministically, in contrast to success probabilities below 50% per swapping with linear optics. The scheme requires efficient collection of the emitted photons, which can be achieved with cavities, and efficient conversion of their wavelength, which can be done via stimulated parametric down-conversion. We also suggest how to realize temporal multiplexing, which offers additional significant speed ups in entanglement distribution, with trapped ions.