Improving trapped-ion-qubit memories via code-mediated error-channel balancing

Abstract

The high-fidelity storage of quantum information is crucial for quantum computation and communication. Many experimental platforms for these applications exhibit highly biased noise, with good resilience to spin depolarisation undermined by high dephasing rates. In this work, we demonstrate that the memory performance of a noise-biased trapped-ion qubit memory can be greatly improved by incorporating error correction of dephasing errors through teleportation of the information between two repetition codes written on a pair of qubit registers in the same trap. While the technical requirements of error correction are often considerable, we show that our protocol can be achieved with a single global entangling phase gate of remarkably low fidelity, leveraging the fact that the gate errors are also dominated by dephasing-type processes. By rebalancing the logical spin-flip and dephasing error rates, we show that for realistic parameters our memory can exhibit error rates up to two orders of magnitude lower than the unprotected physical qubits, thus providing a useful means of improving memory performance in trapped ion systems where field-insensitive qubits are not available.