The authors call attention to a previous work [M. Feng, Phys. Rev. A 63, 052308 (2001)] for Grover search by trapped ions in decoherence-free subspace (DFS). A scheme for a two-qubit conditional-phase flip gate in DFS is presented as a supplement.
In this Comment on Feng's paper [Phys. Rev. A 63, 052308 (2001)], we show that Grover's algorithm may be performed exactly using the gate set given, provided that small changes are made to the gate sequence. An analytic expression for the probability of success of Grover's algorithm for any unitary operator U instead of Hadamard gate is presented.
The desired interference required for quantum computing may be modified by wave-function oscillations for the implementation of quantum algorithms [Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 1615 (2000)]. To diminish such a detrimental effect, we propose a scheme with trapped ion pairs as qubits and apply the scheme to the Grover search. It will be shown that our scheme cannot only carry out a full Grover search, but can also meet the requirement for scalable hot-ion quantum computing. Moreover, the ion-pair qubits in our scheme are more robust against decoherence and the dissipation caused by the environment than single-particle qubits proposed before.