George Toh

Mid-circuit measurement and reset of subsets of qubits is a crucial ingredient of quantum error correction and many quantum information applications. Measurement of atomic qubits is accomplished through resonant fluorescence, which typically disturbs neighboring atoms due to photon scattering. We propose and prototype a new scheme for measurement that provides both spatial and spectral isolation by using tightly-focused individual laser beams and narrow atomic transitions. The unique advantage of this scheme is that all operations are applied exclusively to the read-out qubit, with negligible disturbance to the other qubits of the same species and little overhead. In this letter, we pave the way for non-invasive and high fidelity mid-circuit measurement and demonstrate all key building blocks on a single trapped barium ion.

We entangle two co-trapped atomic barium ion qubits by collecting single visible photons from each ion through in-vacuo 0.8 NA objectives, interfering them through an integrated fiber-beamsplitter and detecting them in coincidence. This projects the qubits into an entangled Bell state with an observed fidelity lower bound of F > 94%. We also introduce an ytterbium ion for sympathetic cooling to remove the need for recooling interruptions and achieve a continuous entanglement rate of 250 1/s.

Photonic interconnects between quantum systems will play a central role in both scalable quantum computing and quantum networking. Entanglement of remote qubits via photons has been demonstrated in many platforms; however, improving the rate of entanglement generation will be instrumental for integrating photonic links into modular quantum computers. We present an ion trap system that has the highest reported free-space photon collection efficiency for quantum networking. We use a pair of in-vacuum aspheric lenses, each with a numerical aperture of 0.8, to couple 10% of the 493 nm photons emitted from a $^{138}$Ba$^+$ ion into single-mode fibers. We also demonstrate that proximal effects of the lenses on the ion position and motion can be mitigated.