Svetoslav S. Ivanov

We design composite controlled-phase gates, which compensate errors in the phase of a single gate. The errors can be of various nature, such as relative, absolute or both. We present composite sequences which are robust to relative errors up to the 6th order, with the number of the constituent gates growing just linearly with the desired accuracy, and we describe a method to achieve even higher accuracy. We show that the absolute error can be canceled entirely with only two gates. We describe an ion-trap implementation of our composite gates, in which simultaneous cancellation of the error in both the pulse area and the detuning is achieved.

We propose a simplified mathematical construction of the quantum Fourier transform which is suited for systems described by Ising-type Hamiltonians. By contrast to the standard Cooley-Tuckey scheme, which prescribes sequences of CPHASE gates, our implementation is based on one-qubit gates and a free evolution process. We also show how to obtain a quadratic speed-up by applying the conditional interactions simultaneously. Thus rather than O($N^2$) our implementation time scales as O($N$). Finally, we show a realization of our method with homogeneous microwave driven ion traps in a magnetic field with gradient.

We propose a fast and efficient technique to create classes of highly entangled states of trapped ions, such as arbitrary Dicke states and superpositions of them, e.g. NOON states. The ions are initialized in the phonon ground state and are addressed globally with a composite pulse that is resonant with the first motional sideband. The technique operates on comparatively short time scales, as resonant interactions allow one to use the minimum laser pulse area. The number of single pulses from the composite sequence is equal to the number of ions, thus the implementation complexity grows only linearly with the size of the system. The approach does not require individual addressing of the ions in the trap and can be applied both inside and outside the Lamb-Dicke regime.

We study theoretically the collective E$\otimes$e Jahn-Teller-Dicke distortion in a system of trapped ions. We focus in the limit of infinite range interactions in which an ensemble of effective spins interacts with two collective vibrational modes with U(1) symmetric couplings. Our model is exactly solvable in the thermodynamical limit and it is amenable to be solved by exact numerical diagonalization for a moderate number of ions. We show that trapped ions are ideally suited to study the emergence of spontaneous symmetry breaking of a continuous symmetry and magnetic structural phase transition in a mesoscopic system.

We present a scalable uniform technique for construction of highly conditional C$^n$-NOT quantum gates of trapped ion qubits, such as the Toffoli gate, without using ancilla states and circuits of an exorbitant number of concatenated one- and two-qubit gates. Apart from the initial dressing of the internal qubit states with vibrational phonons and the final restoration of the phonon ground state, our technique requires the application of just a single composite pulse on the target qubit and is applicable both in and outside the Lamb-Dicke regime. We design special narrowband composite pulses, which suppress all transitions but the conditional transition of the target qubit; moreover, these composite pulses significantly improve the spatial addressing selectivity.

We propose an ion trap implementation of Grover's quantum search algorithm for an unstructured database of arbitrary length N. The experimental implementation is appealingly simple because the linear ion trap allows for a straightforward construction, in a single interaction step and without a multitude of Hadamard transforms, of the reflection operator, which is the engine of the Grover algorithm. Consequently, a dramatic reduction in the number of the required physical steps takes place, to just O(\sqrt{N}), the same as the number of the mathematical steps. The proposed setup allows for demonstration of both the original (probabilistic) Grover search and its deterministic variation, and is remarkably robust to imperfections in the register initialization.