Anthony M. Polloreno

Trapped ions boast long coherence times and excellent gate fidelities, making them a useful platform for quantum information processing. Scaling to larger numbers of ion qubits in RF Paul traps demands great effort. Another technique for trapping ions is via a Penning trap where a 2D crystal of hundreds of ions is formed by controlling the rotation of the ions in the presence of a strong magnetic field. However, the rotation of the ion crystal makes single ion addressability a significant challenge. We propose a protocol that takes advantage of a deformable mirror to introduce AC Stark shift patterns that are static in the rotating frame of the crystal. Through numerical simulations we validate the potential of this protocol to perform high-fidelity single-ion gates in crystalline arrays of hundreds of ions.

In state-of-the-art quantum computing platforms, including superconducting qubits and trapped ions, imperfections in the 2-qubit entangling gates are the dominant contributions of error to system-wide performance. Recently, a novel 2-qubit parametric gate was proposed and demonstrated with superconducting transmon qubits. This gate is activated through RF modulation of the transmon frequency and can be operated at an amplitude where the performance is first-order insensitive to flux-noise. In this work we experimentally validate the existence of this AC sweet spot and demonstrate its dependence on white noise power from room temperature electronics. With these factors in place, we measure coherence-limited entangling-gate fidelities as high as 99.2 $\pm$ 0.15%.