Realisation of controlled-NOT gate (CNOT) operation between two individual ions as a universal two-bit quantum gate based from the proposals of Cirac and Zoller, is presented. Two single /sup 40/Ca/sup +/ ions are held in a linear Paul trap and are individually addressed with focused laser beams. Superpositions of the S/sub 1/2 /and the D/sub 5/2/ long lived electronic states represent a qubit. A sequence of well suited laser pulses flips the state of the target ion conditional to the state of the control ion.
The universality theorem in quantum computing states that any quantum computational task can be decomposed into a finite set of logic gates operating on one and two qubits. However, the process of such decomposition is generally inefficient, often leading to exponentially many gates to realize an arbitrary computational task. Practical processor designs benefit greatly from availability of multi-qubit gates that operate on more than two qubits to implement the desired circuit. In 1995, Cirac and Zoller proposed a method to realize native multi-qubit controlled-Z gates in trapped ion systems, which has a stringent requirement on ground-state cooling of the motional modes utilized by the gate. An alternative approach, the Mølmer-Sørensen gate, is robust against residual motional excitation and has been a foundation for many high-fidelity gate demonstrations. This gate does not scale well beyond two qubits, incurring additional overhead when used to construct many target algorithms. Here, we take advantage of novel performance benefits of long ion chains to realize fully programmable and scalable high-fidelity Cirac-Zoller gates.