Blueprint for a microwave trapped-ion quantum computer

TL;DR

This paper proposes a scalable, modular microwave trapped-ion quantum computer architecture using silicon microfabrication, ion transport, and long-wavelength radiation gates, enabling fault-tolerant quantum computation with current technology.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blueprint for a modular, scalable trapped-ion quantum computer architecture utilizing microwave gates and ion transport, compatible with existing fabrication techniques.

Findings

Design enables scalable quantum computing with ion transport.

Modules are compatible with current silicon microfabrication.

Fault-tolerant operations can be implemented using surface error correction.

Abstract

The availability of a universal quantum computer will have fundamental impact on a vast number of research fields and society as a whole. An increasingly large scientific and industrial community is working towards the realization of such a device. An arbitrarily large quantum computer is best constructed using a modular approach. We present a blueprint for a trapped-ion based scalable quantum computer module which makes it possible to create a scalable quantum computer architecture based on long-wavelength radiation quantum gates. The modules control all operations as stand-alone units, are constructed using silicon microfabrication techniques and they are within reach of current technology. To perform the required quantum computations, the modules make use of long-wavelength-radiation based quantum gate technology. To scale this microwave quantum computer architecture to an arbitrary size we present a fully scalable design that makes use of ion transport between different modules, thereby allowing arbitrarily many modules to be connected to construct a large-scale device. A high-error-threshold surface error correction code can be implemented in the proposed architecture to execute fault-tolerant operations. With only minor adjustments the proposed modules are also suitable for alternative trapped-ion quantum computer architectures, such as schemes using photonic interconnects.