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arXiv:quant-ph/0508037 · Europhysics Letters (EPL)

Arbitrary-speed quantum gates within large ion crystals through minimum control of laser beams

Shi-Liang Zhu, C Monroe, L.-M Duan

Published Jan 5, 2006• 115 citations
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Abstract

We propose a scheme to implement arbitrary-speed quantum entangling gates on two trapped ions immersed in a large linear crystal of ions, with minimal control of laser beams. For gate speeds slower than the oscillation frequencies in the trap, a single appropriately detuned laser pulse is sufficient for high-fidelity gates. For gate speeds comparable to or faster than the local ion oscillation frequency, we discover a five-pulse protocol that exploits only the local phonon modes. This points to a method for efficiently scaling the ion trap quantum computer without shuttling ions.

DOI
10.1209/epl/i2005-10424-4

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We propose a scheme to implement arbitrary-speed quantum entangling gates on two trapped ions immersed in a large linear crystal of ions, with minimal control of laser beams. For gate speeds slower than the oscillation frequencies in the trap, a single appropriately detuned laser pulse is sufficient for high-fidelity gates. For gate speeds comparable to or faster than the local ion oscillation frequency, we discover a five-pulse protocol that exploits only the local phonon modes. This points to a method for efficiently scaling the ion trap quantum computer without shuttling ions.
We propose a scheme to implement arbitrary-speed quantum entangling gates on two trapped ions immersed in a large linear crystal of ions, with minimal control of laser beams. For gate speeds slower than the oscillation frequencies in the trap, a single appropriately-detuned laser pulse is sufficient for high-fidelity gates. For gate speeds comparable to or faster than the local ion oscillation frequency, we discover a five-pulse protocol that exploits only the local phonon modes. This points to a method for efficiently scaling the ion trap quantum computer without shuttling ions.
We propose a scheme to implement quantum gates on any pair of trapped ions immersed in a large linear crystal, using interaction mediated by the transverse phonon modes. Compared with the conventional approaches based on the longitudinal phonon modes, this scheme is much less sensitive to ion heating and thermal motion outside of the Lamb-Dicke limit thanks to the stronger confinement in the transverse direction. The cost for such a gain is only a moderate increase of the laser power to achieve the same gate speed. We also show how to realize arbitrary-speed quantum gates with transverse phonon modes based on simple shaping of the laser pulses.
Fast entangling gates for trapped ion pairs offer vastly improved gate operation times relative to implemented gates, as well as approaches to trap scaling. Gates on a neighbouring ion pair only involve local ions when performed sufficiently fast, and we find that even a fast gate between a pair of distant ions with few degrees of freedom restores all the motional modes given more stringent gate speed conditions. We compare pulsed fast gate schemes, defined by a timescale faster than the trap period, and find that our proposed scheme has less stringent requirements on laser repetition rate for achieving arbitrary gate time targets and infidelities well below 10 −4 . By extending gate schemes to ion crystals, we explore the effect of ion number on gate fidelity for coupling two neighbouring ions in large crystals. Inter-ion distance determines the gate time, and a factor of five increase in repetition rate, or correspondingly the laser power, reduces the infidelity by almost two orders of magnitude. We also apply our fast gate scheme to entangle the first and last ions in a crystal. As the number of ions in the crystal increases, significant increases in the laser power are required to provide the short gate times corresponding to fidelity above 0.99.
We propose a scalable design of entangling quantum gates for large ion crystals with the following desirable features: 1) The gate design is universal and applicable for large ion crystals of arbitrary sizes; 2) The gate has no speed limitation and can work outside of the Lamb-Dicke region; 3) The gate operates by driving from either continuous-wave or pulsed laser beams; 4) The gate is insensitive to slow variation of the laser optical phase and works under a thermal state for the ions' motion; 5) The intrinsic gate infidelity can be reduced to a level well below the threshold for fault-tolerant quantum computation under realistic experimental parameters. Different from the previous gate schemes, here we propose a gate design based on driving of the local oscillation mode of the ions instead of the collective normal modes and develop a formalism based on the Heisenberg equations to deal with the many-body quantum dynamics outside of the Lamb-Dicke region.
Non-adiabatic two-qubit gate proposals for trapped-ion systems offer superior performance and flexibility over adiabatic schemes at the cost of increased laser control requirements. Existing fast gate schemes are limited by single-qubit transition errors, which constrain the total number of pulses in high-fidelity solutions. We introduce an improved gate search scheme that enables both local and non-local two-qubit gates in chains containing tens of ions. These protocols use a multi-objective machine design approach that incorporates dominant sources of error in the design to ensure the solutions are compatible with existing fast laser controls. We also generalize previous schemes by allowing for unpaired pulses during the gate evolution. By imposing symmetries on the pulse sequences, we eliminate susceptibility to laser phase noise and further simplify the multi-mode control over the state-dependent motion of the ion crystal. We perform a comprehensive analysis of expected gate performance in the presence of random and systematic experimental errors to demonstrate the feasibility of performing microsecond two-qubit gates between arbitrary ion pairs in current linear ion-trap processors of up to 505050 ions with fidelities approaching 99.9%99.9\%99.9%.
Ion trap quantum computers are based on modulating the Coulomb interaction between atomic ion qubits using external forces. However, the spectral crowding of collective motional modes could pose a challenge to the control of such interactions for large numbers of qubits. Here, we show that high-fidelity quantum gate operations are still possible with very large trapped ion crystals by using a small and fixed number of motional modes, simplifying the scaling of ion trap quantum computers. We present analytical work that shows that gate operations need not couple to the motion of distant ions, allowing parallel entangling gates with a crosstalk error that falls off as the inverse cube of the distance between the pairs. We also experimentally demonstrate high-fidelity entangling gates on a fully connected set of seventeen 171Yb+^{171}\mathrm{Yb}^{+}171Yb+ qubits using simple laser pulse shapes that primarily couple to just a few modes.