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 qubits, 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 systems with 50-100 qubits, we perform an extensive architectural study evaluating the key design choices of trap sizing, communication topology and operation implementation methods. 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.
To bridge the gap between limited hardware access and the huge demand for experiments for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computing system study, a simulator which can capture the modeling of both the quantum processor and its classical control system to realize early-stage evaluation and design space exploration, is naturally invoked but still missing. This paper presents SANQ, a Simulation framework for Architecting NISQ computing system. SANQ consists of two components, 1) an optimized noisy quantum computing (QC) simulator with flexible error modeling accelerated by eliminating red…
There are several known schemes for entangling trapped ion quantum bits for large-scale quantum computation. Most are based on an interaction between the ions and external optical fields, coupling internal qubit states of trapped-ions to their Coulomb-coupled motion. In this paper, we examine the sensitivity of these motional gate schemes to phase fluctuations introduced through noisy external control fields, and suggest techniques to suppress the resulting phase decoherence.
Individual trapped atomic qubits represent one of the most promising technologies to scale quantum computers, owing to their negligible idle errors and the ability to implement a full set of reconfigurable gate operations via focused optical fields. However, the fidelity of quantum gate operations can be limited by weak confinement of the atoms transverse to the laser. We present measurements of this effect by performing individually-addressed entangling gates in chains of up to 25 trapped atomic ions that are weakly confined along the chain axis. We present a model that accurately describes t…
The quest of demonstrating beneficial quantum error correction in near-term noisy quantum processors can benefit enormously from a low-resource optimization of fault-tolerant schemes, which are specially designed for a particular platform considering both state-of-the-art technological capabilities and main sources of noise. In this work, we show that flag-qubit-based fault-tolerant techniques for active error detection and correction, as well as for encoding of logical qubits, can be leveraged in current designs of trapped-ion quantum processors to achieve this break-even point of beneficial …
We describe a hybrid laser-microwave scheme to implement two-qubit geometric phase gates in crystals of trapped ions. The proposed gates can attain errors below the fault-tolerance threshold in the presence of thermal, dephasing, laser-phase, and microwave-intensity noise. Moreover, our proposal is technically less demanding than previous schemes, since it does not require a laser arrangement with interferometric stability. The laser beams are tuned close to a single vibrational sideband to entangle the qubits, while strong microwave drivings provide the geometric character to the gate, and th…
The transport of excitations governs fundamental properties of matter. Particularly rich physics emerges in the interplay between disorder and environmental noise, even in small systems such as photosynthetic biomolecules. Counterintuitively, noise can enhance coherent quantum transport, which has been proposed as a mechanism behind the high transport efficiencies observed in photosynthetic complexes. This effect has been called "environmental-assisted quantum transport" (ENAQT). Here, we propose a quantum simulation of the excitation transport in an open quantum network, taking advantage of t…
Quantum coherence is one of the clearest departures from classical physics, exhibited when a system is in a superposition of different basis states. Here the coherent superposition of three motional Fock states of a single trapped ion is experimentally certified, with a procedure provably robust against imperfect operation. As the motional state cannot be directly interrogated, our scheme uses an interference pattern generated by projective measurement of the coupled qubit state. The minimum number of coherently superposed states is inferred from a series of threshold values based on analysis …
We derive the life time and loss rate for a trapped particle that is coupled to fluctuating fields in the vicinity of a room-temperature metallic and/or dielectric surface. Our results indicate a clear predominance of near field effects over ordinary blackbody radiation. We develop a theoretical framework for both charged and neutral particles with and without spin. Loss processes that are due to a transition to an untrapped internal state are included.
The cost of enabling connectivity in Noisy-Intermediate-Scale-Quantum devices is an important factor in determining computational power. We have created a qubit routing algorithm which enables efficient global connectivity in a previously proposed trapped ion quantum computing architecture. The routing algorithm was characterized by comparison against both a strict lower bound, and a positional swap based routing algorithm. We propose an error model which can be used to estimate the achievable circuit depth and quantum volume of the device as a function of experimental parameters. We use a new…
A novel robust mechanism for the generation of "trapping states" is shown to exist in the coupling of a two-level system with an oscillator, which is based on nonlinearities in the laser-induced vibronic coupling. This mechanism is exemplified with an ion confined in the potential well of a trap, where the nonlinearities are due to Franck--Condon type overlap integrals of the laser waves with the ionic centre-of-mass wavefunction. In contrast to the coherent trapping mechanism known from micro-maser theory, this mechanism works also in an incoherent regime operated by noisy lasers and is there…
We measure and characterize anomalous motional decoherence of an atomic ion confined in the lowest quantum levels of a novel rf ion trap that features moveable electrodes. The scaling of decoherence rate with electrode proximity is measured, and when the electrodes are cooled from 300 K to 150 K, the decoherence rate is suppressed by an order of magnitude. This provides direct evidence that anomalous motional decoherence of trapped ions stems from microscopic noisy potentials on the electrodes. These observations are relevant to quantum information processing schemes using trapped ions or othe…
Quantum systems in mixed states can be unentangled and yet still correlated in a way that is not possible for classical systems. These correlations can be quantified by the quantum discord and might provide a resource for certain mixed-state quantum information processing tasks. Here we report on the generation of discordant states of two trapped atomic ions via Markovian decoherence processes. While entanglement is strictly non-increasing under such operations, discord can be generated in various forms. Firstly we show that, starting from two classically correlated qubits, it is possible to g…
Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM) is a universal framework which could in principle describe phase transition phenomenon in any system with required symmetry properties. However, a conflicting observation termed anti-KZ behavior has been reported in the study of ferroelectric phase transition, in which slower driving results in more topological defects [S. M. Griffin, et al. Phys. Rev. X. 2, 041022 (2012)]. Although this research is significant, its experimental simulations have been scarce until now. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate anti-KZ behavior under noisy control field in three ki…
We present a detailed study on the possibility of manipulating quantum information encoded in the "radial" modes of arrays of trapped ions (i.e., in the ions' oscillations orthogonal to the trap's main axis). In such systems, because of the tightness of transverse confinement, the radial modes pertaining to different ions can be addressed individually. In the first part of the paper we show that, if local control of the radial trapping frequencies is available, any linear optical and squeezing operation on the locally defined modes - on single as well as on many modes - can be reproduced by ma…
Ensuring the correct functioning of quantum error correction (QEC) circuits is crucial to achieve fault tolerance in realistic quantum processors subjected to noise. The first checkpoint for a fully operational QEC circuit is to create genuine multipartite entanglement across all subsystems of physical qubits. We introduce a conditional witnessing technique to certify genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) that is efficient in the number of subsystems and, importantly, robust against experimental noise and imperfections. Specifically, we prove that the detection of entanglement in a linear nu…
Quantum phase estimation is a paradigmatic problem in quantum sensing andmetrology. Here we show that adaptive methods based on classical machinelearning algorithms can be used to enhance the precision of quantum phase estimation when noisy non-entangled qubits are used as sensors. We employ the Differential Evolution (DE) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms to this task and we identify the optimal feedback policies which minimize the Holevo variance. We benchmark these schemes with respect to scenarios that include Gaussian and Random Telegraph fluctuations as well as reduced Ram…
Trapped ion quantum hardware demonstration of energy calculations using a multireference unitary coupled cluster ansatz: application to the BeH2 insertion problem
Various quantum applications can be reduced to estimating expectation values, which are inevitably deviated by operational and environmental errors. Although errors can be tackled by quantum error correction, the overheads are far from being affordable for near-term technologies. To alleviate the detrimental effects of errors, quantum error mitigation techniques have been proposed, which require no additional qubit resources. Here, we benchmark the performance of a quantum error mitigation technique based on probabilistic error cancellation in a trapped-ion system. Our results clearly show tha…
A disordered system of interacting particles exhibits localized behavior when the disorder is large compared to the interaction strength. Studying this phenomenon on a quantum computer without error correction is challenging because even weak coupling to a thermal environment destroys most signatures of localization. Fortunately, spectral functions of local operators are known to contain features that can survive the presence of noise. In these spectra, discrete peaks and a soft gap at low frequencies compared to the thermal phase indicate localization. Here, we present the computation of spec…
Maximum-Likelihood Amplitude Estimation for Quantum Monte Carlo Integration on Trapped-Ion Hardware: Convergence, Noise-Floor Saturation, Depth-Dependent Bias
BosonQ Psi Corp（BosonQ Psi 公司）；National Quantum Laboratory (QLab), University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学国家量子实验室（QLab））
The concatenated Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (C-GHZ) state has great potential application in the future quantum network, for it is robust to the decoherence in a noisy environment. In the paper, we propose a complete C-GHZ state analysis protocol with the help of some auxiliary single atoms trapped in the low-quality cavities. In the protocol, we essentially make the parity check for the photonic states based on the photonic Faraday rotation effect, and complete the analysis task combined with the Hadamard operation and single qubit measurement. The success probability of our protocol can rea…
It is well known that the neutrino flavor in extreme astrophysical environments changes under the effect of three contributions: the vacuum oscillation, the interaction with the surrounding matter, and the collective oscillations due to interactions between different neutrinos. The latter adds a non-linear contribution to the equations of motion, making the description of their dynamics complex. In this work we study various strategies to simulate the coherent collective oscillations of a system of N neutrinos in the two-flavor approximation using quantum computation. This was achieved by usin…
Error-corrected phase estimation averaged over variable grids on a trapped-ion quantum computer: hyperacuity spectra of a CO molecule adsorbed onto $χ$-Fe$_5$C$_2$
