We study a class of entangling gates for trapped atomic ions and demonstrate the use of numeric optimization techniques to create a wide range of fast, error-robust gate constructions. Our approach introduces a framework for numeric optimization using individually addressed, amplitude and phase modulated controls targeting maximally and partially entangling operations on ion pairs, complete multi-ion registers, multi-ion subsets of large registers, and parallel operations within a single register. Our calculations and simulations demonstrate that the inclusion of modulation of the difference phase for the bichromatic drive used in the Mølmer-Sørensen gate permits approximately time-optimal control across a range of gate configurations, and when suitably combined with analytic constraints can also provide robustness against key experimental sources of error. We further demonstrate the impact of experimental constraints such as bounds on coupling rates or modulation band-limits on achievable performance. Using a custom optimization engine based on TensorFlow we also demonstrate time-to-solution for optimizations on ion registers up to 20 ions of order tens of minutes using a local-instance laptop, allowing computational access to system-scales relevant to near-term trapped-ion devices.
Entangling operations are a necessary tool for large-scale quantum information processing, but experimental imperfections can prevent current schemes from reaching sufficient fidelities as the number of qubits is increased. Here it is shown numerically how multi-toned generalizations of standard trapped-ion entangling gates can simultaneously be made robust against noise and mis-sets of the frequencies of the individual qubits. This relaxes the degree of homogeneity required in the trapping field, making physically larger systems more practical.
Physical systems representing qubits typically have one or more accessible quantum states in addition to the two states that encode the qubit. We demonstrate that active involvement of such auxiliary states can be beneficial in constructing entangling two-qubit operations. We investigate the general case of two multi-state quantum systems coupled via a quantum resonator. The approach is illustrated with the examples of three systems: self-assembled InAs/GaAs quantum dots, NV-centers in diamond, and superconducting transmon qubits. Fidelities of the gate operations are calculated based on numer…
Ion trap is one of the most promising candidates for quantum computing. Current schemes mainly focus on a linear chain of up to about one hundred ions in a Paul trap. To further scale up the qubit number, one possible direction is to use 2D or 3D ion crystals (Wigner crystals). In these systems, ions are generally subjected to large micromotion due to the strong fast-oscillating electric field, which can significantly influence the performance of entangling gates. In this work, we develop an efficient numerical method to design high-fidelity entangling gates in a general 3D ion crystal. We pre…
The ability to reach a maximally entangled state from a separable one through the use of a two-qubit unitary operator is analyzed for mixed states. This extension from the known case of pure states shows that there are at least two families of gates which are able to give maximum entangling power for all values of purity. It is notable that one of this gates coincides with a maximum discording one. We give analytical proof that such gate is indeed perfect entangler at all purities and give numerical evidence for the existence of the second one. Further, we find that there are other gates, many…
Entangling operations are among the most important primitive gates employed in quantum computing and it is crucial to ensure high-fidelity implementations as systems are scaled up. We experimentally realize and characterize a simple scheme to minimize errors in entangling operations related to the residual excitation of mediating bosonic oscillator modes that both improves gate robustness and provides scaling benefits in larger systems. The technique employs discrete phase shifts in the control field driving the gate operation, determined either analytically or numerically, to ensure all modes…
Large-scale multimode entangling-gate synthesis in trapped-ion systems
State Key Laboratory of Low Dimensional Quantum Physics, Department of Physics, Tsinghua University（清华大学物理系低维量子物理国家重点实验室）；Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences（北京量子信息科学研究院）；Frontier Science Center for Quantum Information（量子信息前沿科学中心）；Center for Trapped Ion Quantum Science, Institute for Basic Science（基础科学研究院捕获离子量子科学中心）
We study entanglement of the motional degrees of freedom of two tethered and optically trapped microdisks inside a single cavity. By properly choosing the position of the trapped objects in the optical cavity and driving proper modes of the cavity it is possible to equip the system with linear and quadratic optomechanical couplings. We show that a parametric coupling between the fundamental vibrational modes of two tethered mircodiscs can be generated via a time modulated input laser. For a proper choice of the modulation frequency, this mechanism can drive the motion of the microdisks into an…
We present a general theory for laser-free entangling gates with trapped-ion hyperfine qubits, using either static or oscillating magnetic-field gradients combined with a pair of uniform microwave fields symmetrically detuned about the qubit frequency. By transforming into a `bichromatic' interaction picture, we show that either ${\hatσ_ϕ\otimes\hatσ_ϕ}$ or ${\hatσ_{z}\otimes\hatσ_{z}}$ geometric phase gates can be performed. The gate basis is determined by selecting the microwave detuning. The driving parameters can be tuned to provide intrinsic dynamical decoupling from qubit frequency fluct…
Color centers in solids, such as the nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond, offer well-protected and well-controlled localized electron spins that can be employed in various quantum technologies. Moreover, the long coherence time of the surrounding spinful nuclei can enable a robust quantum register controlled through the color center. We design pulse sequence protocols that drive the electron spin to generate robust entangling gates with these nuclear memory qubits. We find that compared to using Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG) alone, Uhrig decoupling sequence and hybrid protocols composed of C…
Crosstalk Insensitive Trapped-Ion Entanglement through Coupling Matrix Engineering
Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, University of Maryland（马里兰大学量子信息与计算联合中心）；Department of Physics, University of Maryland（马里兰大学物理系）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学电气与计算机工程系）
The quantum evolution of a cloud of bosons initially localized on part of a one dimensional optical lattice and suddenly subjected to a linear ramp is studied, realizing a quantum analog of the "Galileo ramp" experiment. The main remarkable effects of this realistic setup are revealed using analytical and numerical methods. Only part of the particles are ejected for a high enough ramp, while the others remain self-trapped. Then, the trapped density profile displays rich dynamics with Josephson-like oscillations around a plateau. This setup, by coupling bound states to propagative modes, create…
The cluster state model for quantum computation has paved the way for schemes that allow scalable quantum computing, even when using non-deterministic quantum gates. Here the initial step is to prepare a large entangled state using non-deterministic gates. A key question in this context is the relative efficiencies of different `strategies', i.e. in what order should the non-deterministic gates be applied, in order to maximize the size of the resulting cluster states? In this paper we consider this issue in the context of `large' cluster states. Specifically, we assume an unlimited resource of…
Superconducting transmon qubits comprise one of the most promising platforms for quantum information processing due to their long coherence times and to their scalability into larger qubit networks. However, their weakly anharmonic spectrum leads to spectral crowding in multiqubit systems, making it challenging to implement fast, high-fidelity gates while avoiding leakage errors. To address this challenge, we use a protocol known as SWIPHT [Phys. Rev. B 91, 161405(R) (2015)], which yields smooth, simple microwave pulses designed to suppress leakage without sacrificing gate speed through spectr…
Microwave control of trapped ions can provide an implementation of high-fidelity two-qubit gates free from errors induced by photon scattering. Furthermore, microwave conductors may be embedded into a scalable trap structure, providing the chip-level integration of control that is desirable for scaling. Recent developments have demonstrated how amplitude modulation of the gate drive can permit a two-qubit entangling operation to become robust against motional mode noise and other experimental imperfections. Here, we discuss a method for the numerical optimization of the microwave pulse envelop…
We extend recent work on a leakage-protected, adiabatic entangling gate for exchange-only spin qubits [Doherty and Wardrop, PRL 111, 050503 (2013)] by adapting to a setting where single spins are not assumed to be polarized on preparation. Previous gate constructions do not function correctly when "gauge spins" are uninitialized, because the entangling gate has different, non-trivial action in different gauge subspaces. Our construction inherits many of the desirable features of the previous work while addressing the gauge-dependent behavior. Using numerical simulation, we show that the result…
Trapped-ion quantum computers have demonstrated high-performance gate operations in registers of about ten qubits. However, scaling up and parallelizing quantum computations with long one-dimensional (1D) ion strings is an outstanding challenge due to the global nature of the motional modes of the ions which mediate qubit-qubit couplings. Here, we devise methods to implement scalable and parallel entangling gates by using engineered localized phonon modes. We propose to tailor such localized modes by tuning the local potential of individual ions with programmable optical tweezers. Localized mo…
We address a problem of generating a robust entangling gate between electronic and nuclear spins in the system of a single nitrogen-vacany centre coupled to a nearest Carbon-13 atom in diamond against certain types of systematic errors such as pulse-length and off-resonance errors. We analyse the robustness of various control schemes: sequential pulses, composite pulses and numerically-optimised pulses. We find that numerically-optimised pulses, produced by the gradient ascent pulse engineering algorithm (GRAPE), are more robust than the composite pulses and the sequential pulses. The optimise…
Frequency-Multiplexed Parallel Gates for Quantum LDPC Codes in a Two-Dimensional Ion Crystal
Center for Quantum Information, Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University（清华大学交叉信息研究院量子信息中心）；Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室）；New Cornerstone Science Laboratory, Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University（清华大学交叉信息研究院新基石科学实验室）
Optimal control theory provides a framework for numerical discovery of device controls that implement quantum logic gates, but common objective functions used for optimization often assign arbitrarily high costs to otherwise useful controls. We propose a framework for designing objective functions that permit novel gate designs such as echo pulses or locally-equivalent gates. We use numerical simulations to demonstrate the efficacy of the new objective functions by designing microwave-only pulses that act as entangling gates for superconducting transmon architectures. We observe that the propo…
We use the numerical optimization techniques of Uskov et al. [PRA 81, 012303 (2010)] to investigate the behavior of the success rates for KLM style [Nature 409, 46 (2001)] two- and three-qubit entangling gates. The methods are first demonstrated at perfect fidelity, and then extended to imperfect gates. We find that as the perfect fidelity condition is relaxed, the maximum attainable success rates increase in a predictable fashion depending on the size of the system, and we compare that rate of increase for several gates.
We propose a scheme to implement high-fidelity conditional phase gates on pair of trapped ions immersed in a two-dimensional Coulomb crystal, using interaction mediated by all axial modes without side-band addressing. We show through numerical calculations that only local modes can be excited to achieve entangling gates through shaping the laser beams, so that the complexity of the quantum gate does not increase with the size of the system. These results suggest a promising approach for realization of large scale fault-tolerant quantum computation in two dimensional traps architecture.
Fidelity bounds for spin-dependent kicks with pulsed lasers
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid（马德里卡洛斯三世大学）；IonQ, Inc.（IonQ公司）；Instituto de Física Fundamental, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IFF-CSIC)（西班牙高等科学研究所基础物理研究所）
We present a method that combines continuous and pulsed microwave radiation patterns to achieve robust interactions among hyperfine trapped ions placed in a magnetic field gradient. More specifically, our scheme displays continuous microwave drivings with modulated phases, phase flips, and $π$ pulses. This leads to high-fidelity entangling gates which are resilient against magnetic field fluctuations, changes on the microwave amplitudes, and crosstalk effects. Our protocol runs with arbitrary values of microwave power, which includes the technologically relevant case of low microwave intensiti…
We demonstrate the experimental realization of a two-qubit Mølmer-Sørensen gate on a magnetic field-insensitive hyperfine transition in $^9$Be$^+$ ions using microwave-near fields emitted by a single microwave conductor embedded in a surface-electrode ion trap. The design of the conductor was optimized to produce a high oscillating magnetic field gradient at the ion position. The measured gate fidelity is determined to be $98.2\pm1.2\,\%$ and is limited by technical imperfections, as is confirmed by a comprehensive numerical error analysis. The conductor design can potentially simplify the imp…
In multi-qubit system, correlated errors subject to unwanted interactions with other qubits is one of the major obstacles for scaling up quantum computers to be applicable. We present two approaches to correct such noise and demonstrate with high fidelity and robustness. We use spectator and intruder to discriminate the environment interacting with target qubit in different parameter regime. Our proposed approaches combines analytical theory and numerical optimization, and are general to obtain smooth control pulses for various qubit systems. Both theory and numerical simulations demonstrate t…
Although single and two-qubit gates are sufficient for universal quantum computation, single-shot three-qubit gates greatly simplify quantum error correction schemes and algorithms. We design fast, high-fidelity three-qubit entangling gates based on microwave pulses for transmon qubits coupled through a superconducting resonator. We show that when interqubit frequency differences are comparable to single-qubit anharmonicities, errors occur primarily through a single unwanted transition. This feature enables the design of fast three-qubit gates based on simple analytical pulse shapes that are e…
Microwave near-field quantum control of spin and motional degrees of freedom of 25Mg+ ions can be used to generate two-ion entanglement, as recently demonstrated in Ospelkaus et al. [Nature 476, 181 (2011)]. Here, we describe additional details of the setup and calibration procedures for these experiments. We discuss the design and characteristics of the surface-electrode trap and the microwave system, and compare experimental measurements of the microwave near-fields with numerical simulations. Additionally, we present a method that utilizes oscillating magnetic-field gradients to detect micr…
