Design, Fabrication, and Experimental Demonstration of Junction Surface Ion Traps

TL;DR

This paper reports the design, fabrication, and experimental validation of Y-shaped junction surface ion traps that enable high-fidelity ion shuttling and stable multi-ion operations, advancing scalable quantum computing architectures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Y-shaped junction surface ion trap design with minimized pseudopotential variations and demonstrates robust ion shuttling and multi-ion operations without loss.

Findings

Over one million successful ion shuttles without loss

Negligible variation in ion trapping due to dielectric surfaces

Successful splitting, swapping, and recombining of ion chains

Abstract

We present the design, fabrication, and experimental implementation of surface ion traps with Y-shaped junctions. The traps are designed to minimize the pseudopotential variations in the junction region at the symmetric intersection of three linear segments. We experimentally demonstrate robust linear and junction shuttling with greater than one million round-trip shuttles without ion loss. By minimizing the direct line of sight between trapped ions and dielectric surfaces, negligible day-to-day and trap-to-trap variations are observed. In addition to high-fidelity single-ion shuttling, multiple-ion chains survive splitting, ion-position swapping, and recombining routines. The development of two-dimensional trapping structures is an important milestone for ion-trap quantum computing and quantum simulations.