Trapped Ions and Their Applications

Joel H. Parks

Masatoshi Kajita

This engaging book presents the fundamentals of ion traps and their use in physics, chemistry and their technological applications. Following an overview of the types of traps and their operation, the book explores their key areas of application for the development of new physics, chemistry, or engineering at a level accessible by students. The introductory nature and broad coverage will also make the book essential reading for scientists who wish to understand and explore the use of ion traps in their research. Embracing optical manipulation, entanglement and exploitation in quantum computing, chemical reactivity, atomic clocks and testing fundamental physics this book provides a broad and accessible introduction to the world of ion traps and how our understanding and exploitation of trapped ions is furthering modern science and technology. Key features • An accessible overview of ion traps and their applications. • Extensive coverage includes relevant physics and applications in physics and chemistry. • Introduces the main areas of application in modern scientific research. • Appendices feature mathematical topics and descriptions for advanced readers.

Norbert M. Linke

Prakash Murali, Dripto M. Debroy, Kenneth R. Brown +1 more

Trapped ions (TI) are a leading candidate for building Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware. TI qubits have fundamental advantages over other technologies such as superconducting qubits, including high qubit quality, coherence and connectivity. However, current TI systems are small in size, with 5-20 qubits and typically use a single trap architecture which has fundamental scalability limitations. To progress towards the next major milestone of 50-100 qubit TI devices, a modular architecture termed the Quantum Charge Coupled Device (QCCD) has been proposed. In a QCCD-based TI device, small traps are connected through ion shuttling. While the basic hardware components for such devices have been demonstrated, building a 50-100 qubit system is challenging because of a wide range of design possibilities for trap sizing, communication topology and gate implementations and the need to match diverse application resource requirements.Towards realizing QCCD-based TI systems with 50-100 qubits, we perform an extensive application-driven architectural study evaluating the key design choices of trap sizing, communication topology and operation implementation methods. To enable our study, we built a design toolflow which takes a QCCD architecture's parameters as input, along with a set of applications and realistic hardware performance models. Our toolflow maps the applications onto the target device and simulates their execution to compute metrics such as application run time, reliability and device noise rates. Using six applications and several hardware design points, we show that trap sizing and communication topology choices can impact application reliability by up to three orders of magnitude. Microarchitectural gate implementation choices influence reliability by another order of magnitude. From these studies, we provide concrete recommendations to tune these choices to achieve highly reliable and performant application executions. With industry and academic efforts underway to build TI devices with 50-100 qubits, our insights have the potential to influence QC hardware in the near-future and accelerate the progress towards practical QC systems.

Timur Abbasov, Sergei A. Zibrov, I. Sherstov

We present a segmented linear surface electrode ion trap design that can be used for various applications in optical clocks and quantum computation based on trapped 171Yb+ ions. Our simulations show that calculated trap depth can reach up to several electronvolts and that the pseudopotential minimum of the trap is located above the trap surface at a distance greater than 80 μm. The described pseudopotential simulations and calculations of different trap parameters can be used to design the planar trap with required parameters. This design could be scaled to store a long chain of ions and used for quantum logic applications as well.

Miguel Orszag