We theoretically show that when two largely separated trapped atoms interact with a trapped ion via Rydberg excitation of the atoms, the ion-mediated interaction between the atoms exceeds the direct atom-atom interaction by several orders of magnitude. Since the motion of the atoms is much slower than the motion of the ion, we resort to Born-Oppenheimer approximation to calculate the ion-mediated adiabatic potential. We also calculate the ion-mediated phonon modes of the atoms that are separated by more than 10 micron. For cylindrical geometry of the system and both the atoms being excited to the same Rydberg state, the stretched and center-of-mass (COM) axial or transverse phonon modes are found to be almost degenerate, while the phonon modes are non-degenerate when one atom is in a Rydberg state and the other in the ground state. We discuss the non-adiabatic effects in the system that give rise to a Gauge structure and associated geometric phase in the system. This study may open a new perspective in quantum computing and exploring molecular physics associated with a conical intersection using an ion-atom hybrid architecture.
Trapped atomic ion crystals are a leading platform for quantum simulations of spin systems, with programmable and long-range spin-spin interactions mediated by excitations of phonons in the crystal. We describe a complementary approach for quantum simulations of bosonic systems using phonons in trapped-ion crystals, here mediated by excitations of the trapped-ion spins. The scheme enables a high degree of programability across a dense graph of bosonic couplings, utilizing long-lived collective phonon modes in a trapped-ion chain. As such, it is well suited for tackling hard problems such as boson sampling and simulations of long-range bosonic and spin-boson Hamiltonians.
We study the dynamics of phonon-mediated qubit-qubit interactions between trapped ions in the presence of an ultracold atomic gas. By deriving and solving a master equation to describe the combined system, we show that the presence of the atoms causes the quantum gate quality to reduce because of motional decoherence. On the other hand, we calculate that the gas may be used to keep the ion crystal cold in the presence of external heating due to electric-field noise. We show that tuning the atom-ion scattering length allows one to tune the cooling rate of the ions and would make it possible to temporarily reduce the effects of the gas during a quantum gate while keeping the ions cold over long timescales. In this way, the trapped ion quantum computer may be buffer gas cooled. The system may also be used for quantum-enhanced measurements of the atom-ion interactions or properties of the atomic bath.
We theoretically demonstrate the universal two-qubit CNOT gate between an ionic and an atomic qubit relying on Rydberg excitation of the atom and the resulting phonon blockade in the motional states of the harmonically trapped ion. The phonon blockade arises due to strong ion-atom interaction when the atom is excited to a Rydberg state. For realistic parameters, the gate fidelity is found to be about
90%. In a previous paper [S. Mudli {\it et al.} Phys. Rev. A 110, 062618 (2024)], it was shown that a trapped ion can mediate interaction between two largely separated Rydberg atoms, and this mediated interaction can be leveraged to perform a universal two-qubit gate operation between neutral atom qubits in optical tweezers. These demonstrations suggest that an ion-atom hybrid system can serve as a resourceful platform or module for quantum computing and quantum networking as it can utilize the best features of charged as well as neutral atom qubits. Finally, we discuss how to achieve higher gate fidelity by extending our proposed protocol and operating in a different parameter regime.