Yakov Solomons

Quantum circuit synthesis and compilation are critical components in the quantum computing stack, both for contemporary quantum systems, where efficient use of limited resources is essential, as well as for large-scale fault-tolerant platforms, where computation time can be minimized. The specific characteristics of the quantum hardware determine which circuit designs and optimizations are feasible. We present a phase-gadget based method for compilation of quantum circuits using programmable multiqubit entangling gates, that are native, among others, to trapped-ions quantum computers. We use phase-gadgets in order to generically reduce circuit depths and efficiently implement them with few, high-fidelity, multiqubit gates. We test our methods on a large set of benchmark circuits and demonstrate generic circuit depth reduction and implementation error reduction.

Trapped-ion quantum computing can utilize all motional modes of the ion-crystal, to entangle multiple qubits simultaneously, enabling universal computation with multi-qubit gates supplemented by single-qubit rotations. Using multiple tones to drive each ion individually induces Ising-type interactions, forming a multi-qubit gate, where the coupling matrix of all ion pairs is fully controllable. This reduces the total gate count while maintaining high fidelity, as opposed to traditional methods that rely on a single type of two-qubit gate, such as the well-known Mølmer-Sørensen gate. However, scaling to large ion chains, individual addressing can be technically challenging in terms of optical delivery and signal generation. We explore global and semi-global drives combined with single-qubit flips and show that these can reproduce the full set of multi-qubit gates. Although optimizing the combination of single-qubit flips is a computationally hard problem, we propose an efficient scheme to implement any desired couplings in large ion chains, yielding a concatenation scheme that uses at most $N/2$ multi-qubit gates, with $N$ being the number of ions. In addition, we show that by using $B<N$ independent semi-global fields, each driving a set of $N/B$ ions, the number of maximal multi-qubit gates is reduced to approximately $\frac{N^2}{B^2 (N-1)}$. We show how to design the driving fields that support these schemes and investigate their properties. Our results pave the way for efficient implementations of quantum algorithms in large-scale trapped-ion quantum systems.