Fast gates for ion traps by splitting laser pulses

TL;DR

This paper introduces a rapid ion trap phase gate method using split ultra-fast laser pulses, significantly reducing operation time by exciting multiple motional states and overcoming previous speed limitations.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel fast phase gate scheme for ion traps that employs pulse splitting and excitation of multiple motional states, achieving faster gate times than existing methods.

Findings

Gate time is more than 100 times faster than current schemes.

Gate time scales inversely with the number of pulses.

Practical implementation surpasses previous theoretical proposals.

Abstract

We present a fast phase gate scheme that is experimentally achievable and has an operation time more than two orders of magnitude faster than current experimental schemes for low numbers of pulses. The gate time improves with the number of pulses following an inverse power law. Unlike implemented schemes which excite precise motional sidebands, thus limiting the gate timescale, our scheme excites multiple motional states using discrete ultra-fast pulses. We use beam-splitters to divide pulses into smaller components to overcome limitations due to the finite laser pulse repetition rate. This provides gate times faster than proposed theoretical schemes when we optimise a practical setup.