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Opto-Electronics Review

Optical control system for quantum bit emulator based on green laser, AOM modulators and FPGA technology

Jacek Długopolski, Marek Życzkowski, Anna Pakuła, Szymon Fiderkiewicz, Piotr Kamil Sobotka, Wawrzyniec Suleja, Marcin Sadowski

Published Nov 25, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Scientists involved in building quantum computers are currently facing many physical difficulties. Creating qubits, manipulating them and reading their state requires a lot of experience. This paper describes an optical laser system as a test platform for quantum-optical control that enables effective manipulation of an emulated quantum bit. Importantly, it is a reproduction of the system controlling the optical path in real ion traps. This solution makes it possible to study the phenomena occurring in such systems and to learn about the wide range of problems that a designer and an operator of quantum systems may encounter, even before they start building them. The optical system presented in the article uses, among others, a 532 nm laser, acousto-optic modulators (AOMs), ultrafast light detectors, and a programmable FPGA chip. The entire optical system was then attached to the QUBIT emulator and thoroughly tested. The article describes the design and operation of the proposed optical system and shows an example of how to control it using a Python script.

DOI
10.24425/opelre.2025.157332

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Scientists involved in building quantum computers are currently facing many physical difficulties. Creating qubits, manipulating them and reading their state requires a lot of experience. This paper describes an optical laser system as a test platform for quantum-optical control that enables effective manipulation of an emulated quantum bit. Importantly, it is a reproduction of the system controlling the optical path in real ion traps. This solution makes it possible to study the phenomena occurring in such systems and to learn about the wide range of problems that a designer and an operator of quantum systems may encounter, even before they start building them. The optical system presented in the article uses, among others, a 532 nm laser, acousto-optic modulators (AOMs), ultrafast light detectors, and a programmable FPGA chip. The entire optical system was then attached to the QUBIT emulator and thoroughly tested. The article describes the design and operation of the proposed optical system and shows an example of how to control it using a Python script.
The rapidly developing field of quantum computing and the ongoing lack of widely available quantum computers create the need for scientists to build their simulators. However, mathematical simulation of such circuits usually ignores many aspects and problems found in real quantum systems. In this article, the authors describe a quantum bit emulator based on FPGA integrated circuits. In this case, FPGA technology provides real-time massive parallelism of the modeled physical phenomena. The modeled QUBIT is represented using a Bloch sphere. Its quantum state is set and modified only by precise pulses of an electrical signal, and with the help of similar pulses, it manifests its current state in real time. The constructed QUBIT was additionally equipped with decoherence mechanisms and with circuits that intentionally respond to internal and external noises that distort its current quantum state. This article presents and discusses how such a physically built emulator works.
The rapidly developing field of quantum computing and the ongoing lack of widely available quantum computers create the need for scientists to build their simulators. However, mathematical simulation of such circuits usually ignores many aspects and problems found in real quantum systems. In this article, the authors describe a quantum bit emulator based on FPGA integrated circuits. In this case, FPGA technology provides real-time massive parallelism of the modeled physical phenomena. The modeled QUBIT is represented using a Bloch sphere. Its quantum state is set and modified only by precise pulses of an electrical signal, and with the help of similar pulses, it manifests its current state in real time. The constructed QUBIT was additionally equipped with decoherence mechanisms and with circuits that intentionally respond to internal and external noises that distort its current quantum state. This article presents and discusses how such a physically built emulator works.
In several types of quantum computers light is one of the main tools to control both the position and the quantum state of the atoms used for computing. In practical systems laser light is applied to manipulate quantum states of qubits in the desired way. Beside physical effects like decoherence and quantum noise the precision of qubit manipulation has a significant impact on the achievable quantum computing error rate. One of the key optical components beside the laser is the optical modulator, which modulates or switches a constant power laser light in order to provide light pulses or pulse sequences with a desired envelope. Acousto-optic (AOM) and electro-optic (EOM) modulators can be applied, which are both voltage controlled. However, there is neither a simple linear relationship between their control signal and the precise modulator output, nor can they be considered to have time-invariant characteristics. The aim of this paper is to describe techniques to generate AOM and EOM control signals in such a way that almost arbitrary target output waveforms (i. e. optical power versus time) are achieved with high accuracy.
Trapped ion is one of the leading platforms for quantum simulation experiment due to its long coherence time and high fidelity state initialization, detection, and manipulation. To individually address ions at a single-ion level, it requires sophisticated optical engineering. In the thesis, we present a novel single qubit addressing system that is immune to imperfections of optical imaging and can scale to different size of the system. The technique is based on digital light processing with a commercially available digital micro-mirror device (DMD). \n \nA DMD is a 2D array that consists of tiny micro-mirrors that can be individually manipulated. It is commonly used in movie projectors to modulate the intensity of the light to create the desired image. However, using this technology to ions will require more sophisticated controls over optical wavefronts of the laser beams, for example, the necessity to manipulate the optical phase. It can be achieved by using the DMD as a programmable hologram, which can then be used to characterize and compensate for any imaging imperfections as well. We developed a new iterative Fourier transform algorithm (IFTA) for calculating the holograms. In the simulation, our algorithm shows more than one order of magnitude improvement in accuracy comparing to previously proposed algorithms. We experimentally demonstrated this holographic beam shaping technique with the optical aberration being compensated. The laser we used in the experiment is in the ultraviolet (UV) regime that is close to the optical transition used for manipulating 171mathrmYb+^{171}\\mathrm{Yb}^+171mathrmYb+ qubits. The short wavelength makes it more susceptible to environmental disturbance. \n \nAlso, we proposed and experimentally demonstrated a new scheme that enables holographic controls over lights with multiple laser frequencies simultaneously by combing the DMD with an acousto-optical modulator (AOM). The AOM splits the light and illuminates different zones of the DMD. Each zone has its own hologram forming one frequency channel for addressing. This opens the possibility to engineer more complex Hamiltonian for quantum simulation. For example, we can engineer arbitrary spin-spin interaction graphs by applying the M\\o lmer-S\\o rensen scheme on this new setup.
Quantum computing promises to revolutionize computing by providing exponential speed improvements to classically difficult problems. Over the past 30 years, experimental research has progressed from manipulating quantum systems to creating elementary gates in many quantum mechanical systems. One of the most successful media for implementing quantum gates is trapped ions. Current trapped-ion quantum computing architectures have very high gate fidelities and long coherence times, but creating quantum gates with low error rates with trapped ions is challenging since it requires precise trap and laser control. In order to implement quantum gates with trapped ions, I have created a field-programmable-gate-array- (FPGA) based microarchitecture for constructing laser-pulse sequences and controlling ancillary equipment. The microarchitecture is centralized to minimize experimental timing errors and is programmable to provide the generality necessary for implementing a vast range of experiments.
Optical manipulation of quantum systems requires stable laser sources able to produce complex waveforms over a large frequency range. In the visible region, such waveforms can be generated using an acousto-optic modulator driven by an arbitrary waveform generator, but these suffer from a limited tuning range typically of a few tens of MHz. Visible-range electro-optic modulators are an alternative option offering a larger modulation bandwidth, however they have limited output power which drastically restricts the scalability of quantum applications. There is currently no architecture able to perform phase-stabilized waveforms over several GHz in the visible or near infrared region while providing sufficient optical power for quantum applications. Here we propose and develop a modulation and frequency conversion set-up able to deliver optical waveforms over a large frequency range, with a high spurious extinction ratio, scalable to the entire visible/near infrared region with high optical power. The optical waveforms are first generated at telecom wavelength and then converted to the emitter wavelength through a sum frequency generation process. By adapting the pump laser frequency, the optical waveforms can be tuned to interact with a broad range of optical quantum emitters or qubits such as alkali atoms, trapped ions, rare earth ions, or fluorescent defects in solid-state matrices. Using this architecture, we were able to detect and study a single erbium ion in a nanoparticle. We also generated high bandwidth signals at 606 nm, which would enable frequency multiplexing of on-demand read-out Pr3+:Y2SiO5 quantum memories.