High-speed and high-connectivity two-qubit gates in long chains of trapped ions

TL;DR

This paper proposes a theoretical method for implementing fast, high-fidelity, non-local entangling gates in long chains of trapped ions, enabling scalable quantum computing beyond nearest neighbors.

Contribution

It demonstrates that impulsive spin-dependent excitation can perform high-fidelity, non-local entangling gates in chains of up to 40 ions, with weak dependence on chain length.

Findings

High-fidelity entangling operations between arbitrary ion pairs in chains of up to 40 ions.

Entanglement can be achieved in approximately 1.3-2 oscillation periods.

Pulse error requirements are weakly dependent on chain length and target qubit distance.

Abstract

We present a theoretical study of fast all-to-all entangling gates in trapped-ion quantum processors, based on impulsive excitation of spin-dependent motion with broadband laser pulses. Previous studies have shown that such fast gate schemes are highly scalable and naturally performant outside the Lamb-Dicke regime, however are limited to nearest-neighbour operations. Here we demonstrate that impulsive spin-dependent excitation can be used to perform high-fidelity non-local entangling operations in quasi-uniform chains of up to 40 ions. We identify a regime of phonon-mediated entanglement between arbitrary pairs of ions in the chain, where any two pairs of ions in the chain can be entangled in approximately 1.3-2 centre-of-mass oscillation periods. We assess the experimental feasibility of the proposed gate schemes, which reveals pulse error requirements that are weakly dependent on the length of the ion chain and the distance between the target qubits. These results suggest entangling gates based on impulsive spin-dependent excitation presents new possibilities for large-scale computation in near-term ion-trap devices.