Controlling fast transport of cold trapped ions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates rapid ion transport in a micro-structured trap with minimal energy increase, preserving quantum states, and showcasing potential for scalable quantum computing architectures.

Contribution

It introduces a method for fast, low-energy ion shuttling in micro-traps that maintains quantum coherence, advancing scalable quantum computing.

Findings

Ion transported over 10^4 times its ground state size in 3.6 microseconds

Energy increase during transport is only 0.10 ± 0.01 motional quanta

Quantum information in spin-motion entangled states is preserved during shuttling

Abstract

We realize fast transport of ions in a segmented micro-structured Paul trap. The ion is shuttled over a distance of more than 10^4 times its groundstate wavefunction size during only 5 motional cycles of the trap (280 micro meter in 3.6 micro seconds). Starting from a ground-state-cooled ion, we find an optimized transport such that the energy increase is as low as 0.10 $\pm$ 0.01 motional quanta. In addition, we demonstrate that quantum information stored in a spin-motion entangled state is preserved throughout the transport. Shuttling operations are concatenated, as a proof-of-principle for the shuttling-based architecture to scalable ion trap quantum computing.