Ultrafast coherent excitation of an Ytterbium ion with single laser pulses

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates ultrafast coherent excitation of a Ytterbium ion using a single laser pulse, achieving high population transfer efficiency, which is a key step towards faster quantum gates with trapped ions.

Contribution

It presents the first demonstration of coherent excitation of a Ytterbium ion with a single ultrafast pulse, enabling faster quantum gate operations.

Findings

Achieved 94.3% population transfer with a picosecond pulse.

Demonstrated tunability across the atomic transition.

Achieved 42.5% transfer with large detuning.

Abstract

Experimental realizations of two qubit entangling gates with trapped ions typically rely on addressing spectroscopically resolved motional sidebands, limiting gate speed to the secular frequency. Fast entangling gates using ultrafast pulsed lasers overcome this speed limit. This approach is based on state-dependent photon recoil kicks from a sequence of counter-propagating, resonant, ultrafast pulse pairs, which can allow sub-microsecond gate speeds. Here we demonstrate a key component of the ultrafast gate protocol, the coherent excitation of a 171Yb+ ion across the 2S1/2-2P1/2 transition with a single near-resonant short optical pulse at 369.53 nm. We achieve a maximum population transfer of 94.3(6)% using a picosecond pulsed laser that can be tuned across the 2S1/2-2P1/2 transition, and 42.53(13)% with 190(7) GHz detuning.