Aditya Paul

Sympathetic cooling is a technique often employed to mitigate motional heating in trapped-ion quantum computers. However, choosing system parameters such as number of coolants and cooling duty cycle for optimal gate performance requires evaluating trade-offs between motional errors and other slower errors such as qubit dephasing. The optimal parameters depend on cooling power, heating rate, and ion spacing in a particular system. In this study, we aim to analyze best practices for sympathetic cooling of long chains of trapped ions using analytical and computational methods. We use a case study to show that optimal cooling performance is achieved when coolants are placed at the center of the chain and provide a perturbative upper-bound on the cooling limit of a mode given a particular set of cooling parameters. In addition, using computational tools, we analyze the trade-off between the number of coolant ions in a chain and the center-of-mass mode heating rate. We also show that cooling as often as possible when running a circuit is optimal when the qubit coherence time is otherwise long. These results provide a roadmap for how to choose sympathetic cooling parameters to maximize circuit performance in trapped ion quantum computers using long chains of ions.

Scalable classical controllers are a key component of future fault-tolerant quantum computers. Neutral atom quantum computers leverage commercially available optoelectronic devices for generating large-scale tweezer arrays and performing parallel readout, but implementing massively parallel, locally-addressed gate operations is an open challenge. In this work, we demonstrate an optical modulator system based on off-the-shelf components, which can generate a two-dimensional array of over 10,000 focused spots with uniform frequency and amplitude, and switching them on and off individually in arbitrary configurations at rates of up to 43 kHz. Through careful control of aberrations, the modulator achieves an extinction ratio of 46 dB, and nearest-neighbor crosstalk of $-44$ dB with a beam spacing of 4.6 waists. The underlying components can operate at wavelengths from the UV to the NIR, and sustain high laser intensities. This approach is suitable for local addressing of gates with low cross-talk error rates in any optically addressed qubit platform, including neutral atoms, trapped ions, or solid-state atomic defects.