S. S. Ivanov

The Mølmer-Sørensen (MS) gate is a two-qubit controlled-phase gate in ion traps that is highly valued due to its ability to preserve the motional state of the ions. However, its fidelity is obstructed by errors affecting the motion of the ions as well as the rotation of the qubits. In this work, we propose an amplitude-modulated composite MS gate which features high fidelity robust to gate timing, detuning and coupling errors and is also tolerant of a.c. Stark shifts and drifting detuning errors.

A vital requirement for a quantum computer is the ability to locally address, with high fidelity, any of its qubits without affecting their neighbors. We propose an addressing method using composite sequences of laser pulses, which reduces dramatically the addressing error in a lattice of closely spaced atoms or ions, and at the same time significantly enhances the robustness of qubit manipulations. To this end, we design novel high-fidelity composite pulses for the most important single-qubit operations. In principle, this method allows one to beat the diffraction limit, for only atoms situated in a small spatial region around the center of the laser beam are excited, well within the laser beam waist.

We propose a scalable implementation of Grover's quantum search algorithm in a trapped-ion quantum information processor. The system is initialized in an entangled Dicke state by using simple adiabatic techniques. The inversion-about-average and the oracle operators take the form of single off-resonant laser pulses, addressing, respectively, all and half of the ions in the trap. This is made possible by utilizing the physical symmetrie of the trapped-ion linear crystal. The physical realization of the algorithm represents a dramatic simplification: each logical iteration (oracle and inversion about average) requires only two physical interaction steps, in contrast to the large number of concatenated gates required by previous approaches. This does not only facilitate the implementation, but also increases the overall fidelity of the algorithm.

We present a novel system for the simulation of quantum phase transitions of collective internal qubit and phononic states with a linear crystal of trapped ions. The laser-ion interaction creates an energy gap in the excitation spectrum, which induces an effective phonon-phonon repulsion and a Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard interaction. This system shows features equivalent to phase transitions of polaritons in coupled cavity arrays. Trapped ions allow for easy tunabilty of the hopping frequency by adjusting the axial trapping frequency, and the phonon-phonon repulsion via the laser detuning and intensity. We propose an experimental protocol to access all observables of the system, which allows one to obtain signatures of the quantum phase transitions even with a small number of ions.