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IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing (ICRC)

Reconfigurable and Programmable Ion Trap Quantum Computer

Stewart Allen, Jungsang Kim, David L. Moehring, Christopher R. Monroe

Published Nov 1, 2017• 13 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present progress on the construction and operation of a room- temperature quantum computer built with trapped atomic ion qubits. Based on the technological underpinnings of atomic clocks that define time, atomic qubits are standards of quantum information because they are all identical. They present a fundamentally scalable approach to quantum computation where interactions can be faithfully replicated and measured with near-perfect efficiency. Moreover, the connection among atomic ion qubits are forged from external laser beams and mediated by the Coulomb repulsion between them, and hence behave as a fully reconfigurable quantum circuit, much like an FPGA in classical computation. We further discuss paths to scaling using demonstrated technologies that are unique to this class of quantum computation devices. This flexibility will likely allow ion trap quantum computers to express the superset of all known quantum computation operations, and thus efficiently target any type of application that arises.

DOI
10.1109/icrc.2017.8123665

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•Jan 1, 2018•1 citation
We present progress on the construction and operation of a room- temperature quantum computer built with trapped atomic ion qubits. Based on the technological underpinnings of atomic clocks that define time, atomic qubits are standards of quantum information because they are all identical. They present a fundamentally scalable approach to quantum computation where interactions can be faithfully replicated and measured with near-perfect efficiency. Moreover, the connection among atomic ion qubits are forged from external laser beams and mediated by the Coulomb repulsion between them, and hence behave as a fully reconfigurable quantum circuit, much like an FPGA in classical computation. We further discuss paths to scaling using demonstrated technologies that are unique to this class of quantum computation devices. This flexibility will likely allow ion trap quantum computers to express the superset of all known quantum computation operations, and thus efficiently target any type of application that arises.
Abstract The first generation of quantum computers are on the horizon, fabricated from quantum hardware platforms that may soon be able to tackle certain tasks that cannot be performed or modelled with conventional computers. These quantum devices will not likely be universal or fully programmable, but special-purpose processors whose hardware will be tightly co-designed with particular target applications. Trapped atomic ions are a leading platform for first-generation quantum computers, but they are also fundamentally scalable to more powerful general purpose devices in future generations. This is because trapped ion qubits are atomic clock standards that can be made identical to a part in 1015, and their quantum circuit connectivity can be reconfigured through the use of external fields, without modifying the arrangement or architecture of the qubits themselves. In this forward-looking overview, we show how a modular quantum computer with thousands or more qubits can be engineered from ion crystals, and how the linkage between ion trap qubits might be tailored to a variety of applications and quantum-computing protocols.
Quantum computers can solve certain problems more efficiently compared to conventional classical methods. In the endeavor to build a quantum computer, several competing platforms have emerged that can implement certain quantum algorithms using a few qubits. However, the demonstrations so far have been done usually by tailoring the hardware to meet the requirements of a particular algorithm implemented for a limited number of instances. Although such proof of principal implementations are important to verify the working of algorithms on a physical system, they further need to have the potential to serve as a general purpose quantum computer allowing the flexibility required for running multiple algorithms and be scaled up to host more qubits. Here we demonstrate a small programmable quantum computer based on five trapped atomic ions each of which serves as a qubit. By optically resolving each ion we can individually address them in order to perform a complete set of single-qubit and fully connected two-qubit quantum gates and alsoperform efficient individual qubit measurements. We implement a computation architecture that accepts an algorithm from a user interface in the form of a standard logic gate sequence and decomposes it into fundamental quantum operations that are native to the hardware using a set of compilation instructions that are defined within the software. These operations are then effected through a pattern of laser pulses that perform coherent rotations on targeted qubits in the chain. The architecture implemented in the experiment therefore gives us unprecedented flexibility in the programming of any quantum algorithm while staying blind to the underlying hardware. As a demonstration we implement the Deutsch-Jozsa and Bernstein-Vazirani algorithms on the five-qubit processor and achieve average success rates of 95 and 90 percent, respectively. We also implement a five-qubit coherent quantum Fourier transform and examine its performance in the period finding and phase estimation protocol. We find fidelities of 84 and 62 percent, respectively. While maintaining the same computation architecture the system can be scaled to more ions using resources that scale favorably (O(N^2)) with the number of qubits N.
Trapped atomic ions manipulated by laser beams is a leading candidate to construct scalable and practical quantum computers. Fully programmable quantum computers have been constructed using this technology, offering the highest performance quantum computing in commercial setting. Controlling atomic qubits with lasers is at the heart of constructing reliable trapped ion quantum computers. In this talk, I will discuss the stringent requirement for the optical systems required to build high performance trapped ion quantum computers, and prospect for constructing scalable systems in the future.
Summary form only given. Last year saw the first quantum computers realized that can be programmed from a high level user interface to run arbitrary quantum algorithms [1, 2]. While these devices are still small in scale, only comprising a handful of qubits each, they nevertheless allow the implementation of quantum circuits in a way that is basically blind to the underlying hardware itself. This constitutes a new level of development in quantum computer technology for the two leading approaches, trapped atomic ions [1] and superconducting circuits [3]. It also gives us the opportunity to test quantum computers irrespective of their particular physical implementation for the first time. With multiple companies (IBM, Google, Microsoft, as well as several start-ups) aiming for a larger scale device of commercial viability in the near future, benchmarking quantum computers becomes a crucial pursuit and this work is a step in that direction. Our device consists of five171Yb+atomic ions trapped in a Paul trap [1]. Each provides a pristine “atomic clock” qubit in its atomic structure that can be manipulated with laser light and read out via state-dependent fluorescence. Two-qubit gates between any pair are implemented via laser-mediated interaction of qubits through the normal modes of motion in the trap [4] making it a fully connected system.
Trapped atomic ions are standards for quantum information processing, serving as quantum memories, hosts of quantum gates in quantum computers and simulators, and nodes of quantum communication networks. Quantum bits based on trapped ions enjoy a rare combination of attributes: They have exquisite coherence properties, they can be prepared and measured with nearly 100% efficiency, and they are readily entangled with each other through the Coulomb interaction or remote photonic interconnects. The outstanding challenge is the scaling of trapped ions to hundreds or thousands of qubits and beyond, at which scale quantum processors can outperform their classical counterparts in certain applications. We review the latest progress and prospects in that effort, with the promise of advanced architectures and new technologies, such as microfabricated ion traps and integrated photonics.
Quantum computing represents an exciting frontier in the realm of information processing; it is a promising technology that may provide future advances in a wide range of fields, from quantum chemistry to optimization problems. This thesis discusses experimental results for several quantum algorithms performed on a programmable quantum computer consisting of a linear chain of five or seven trapped 171Yb+ atomic clock ions with long coherence times and high gate fidelities. We execute modular one- and two-qubit computation gates through Raman transitions driven by a beat note between counter-propagating beams from a pulsed laser. The system's individual addressing capability provides arbitrary single-qubit rotations as well as all possible two-qubit entangling gates, which are implemented using a pulse-segmentation scheme. The quantum computer can be programmed from a high-level interface to execute arbitrary quantum circuits, and comes with a toolbox of many important composite gates and quantum subroutines. We present experimental results for a complete three-qubit Grover quantum search algorithm, a hallmark application of a quantum computer with a well-known speedup over classical searches of an unsorted database, and report better-than-classical performance. The algorithm is performed for all 8 possible single-result oracles and all 28 possible two-result oracles. All quantum solutions are shown to outperform their classical counterparts. Performing parallel operations will be a powerful capability as deeper circuits on larger, more complex quantum computers present new challenges. Here, we perform a pair of 2-qubit gates simultaneously in a single chain of trapped ions. We employ a pre-calculated pulse shaping scheme that modulates the phase and amplitude of the Raman transitions to drive programmable high-fidelity 2-qubit entangling gates in parallel by coupling to the collective modes of motion of the ion chain. Ensuring the operation yields only spin-spin interactions between the desired pairs, with neither residual spin-motion entanglement nor crosstalk spin-spin entanglement, is a nonlinear constraint problem, and pulse solutions are found using optimization techniques. As an application, we demonstrate the quantum full adder using a depth-4 circuit requiring the use of parallel 2-qubit operations.