Rapid production of defect-free beryllium ion Coulomb crystals

TL;DR

This paper presents a rapid, vacuum-friendly method using pulsed laser ablation to produce defect-free beryllium ion Coulomb crystals, advancing large-scale quantum information processing capabilities.

Contribution

The authors introduce a fast, efficient technique for creating pure beryllium ion chains without deep UV lasers, reducing vacuum load and enabling defect-free arrays.

Findings

Rapid production of beryllium ion chains within seconds

Vacuum load reduced to 10^(-12) Torr level

Achieved defect-free ion arrays with feedback control

Abstract

Trapped atomic ions find wide applications ranging from precision measurement to quantum information science and quantum computing. Among the different atomic species employed, beryllium ions are widely used due to its light mass and convenient atomic structure. However, the ion loading process requires a high temperature for sufficient vapor pressure, generating undesirable gas load for the background vacuum and limiting the lifetime of a long ion chain. Here, we demonstrate a simple method to rapidly produce pure linear chains of beryllium ions with pulsed laser ablation, serving as a starting point for large-scale quantum information processing. Our method is fast compared to thermal ovens; reduces the vacuum load to only 10^(-12) Torr level; yields a short recovery time of a few seconds; and also eliminates the need for a deep ultraviolet laser for photo-ionization. In addition, we apply feedback control to obtain defect-free ion arrays with desirable lengths.