Micromotion-Enhanced Fast Gates in Experimentally Realizable Regimes

A predominant challenge in realizing near-future trapped-ion quantum computers is the implementation of entangling gate operations that enable scalable quantum information processing, while maintaining both high fidelity and speed.

Current approaches to trapped-ion entangling gates are based on adiabatic transitions, which scale poorly with the number of ions. A promising alternative is offered by so-called ‘fast gates’, which utilize carefully-designed sequences of ultrafast laser pulses to rapidly entangle qubits.

Previous studies significantly constrained fast gate design to reduce the computational complexity of micromotion, and consequently required unrealistic experimental parameters to be realized.

The work presented in this poster removes the limitations of these previous studies and demonstrate that this enhancement allows fast gates in the presence of micromotion to be designed with fidelities above the fault-tolerant threshold required for error-correction (99.9%), with feasible laser repetition rates (100 MHz – 1 GHz), and low pulse numbers (∼40).

Pulse imperfections are the limiting error that inhibits the experimental realisation of fast gates, and here we show a reduction in the number of pulses required through a micromotion enhancement