Ion Trap Quantum Computer Research Articles

Quantum Nuclear Dynamics on a Distributed Set of Ion-Trap Quantum Computing Systems.

Quantum nuclear dynamics with wavepacket time evolution is classically intractable and viewed as a promising avenue for quantum information processing. Here, we use IonQ, Inc.'s 11-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer, Harmony, to study the quantum wavepacket dynamics of a shared-proton within a short-strong hydrogen-bonded system. We also provide the first application of distributed quantum computing for chemical dynamics problems, where a distributed set of quantum processes is constructed using a tensor network formalism. For a range of initial states, we experimentally drive the ion-trap system to emulate the quantum nuclear wavepacket as it evolves along the potential surface generated from the electronic structure. Following the experimental creation of the nuclear wavepacket, we extract measurement observables such as its time-dependent spatial projection and its characteristic vibrational frequencies to good agreement with classical results. Vibrational eigenenergies obtained from quantum computation are in agreement with those obtained from classical simulations to within a fraction of a kilocalorie per mole, thus suggesting chemical accuracy. Our approach opens a new paradigm for studying the quantum chemical dynamics and vibrational spectra of molecules and also provides the first demonstration of parallel quantum computation on a distributed set of ion-trap quantum computers.

Large-scale simulations of Floquet physics on near-term quantum computers

Periodically driven quantum systems exhibit a diverse set of phenomena but are more challenging to simulate than their equilibrium counterparts. Here, we introduce the Quantum High-Frequency Floquet Simulation (QHiFFS) algorithm as a method to simulate fast-driven quantum systems on quantum hardware. Central to QHiFFS is the concept of a kick operator which transforms the system into a basis where the dynamics is governed by a time-independent effective Hamiltonian. This allows prior methods for time-independent simulation to be lifted to simulate Floquet systems. We use the periodically driven biaxial next-nearest neighbor Ising (BNNNI) model, a natural test bed for quantum frustrated magnetism and criticality, as a case study to illustrate our algorithm. We implemented a 20-qubit simulation of the driven two-dimensional BNNNI model on Quantinuum’s trapped ion quantum computer. Our error analysis shows that QHiFFS exhibits not only a cubic advantage in driving frequency ω but also a linear advantage in simulation time t compared to Trotterization.

Electromagnetically Induced Transparency Cooling of High-Nuclear-Spin Ions.

We report the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) cooling of ^{137}Ba^{+} ions with a nuclear spin of I=3/2, which are a good candidate of qubits for future large-scale trapped-ion quantum computing. EIT cooling of atoms or ions with a complex ground-state level structure is challenging due to the lack of an isolated Λ system, as the population can escape from the Λ system to reduce the cooling efficiency. We overcome this issue by leveraging an EIT pumping laser to repopulate the cooling subspace, ensuring continuous and effective EIT cooling. We cool the two radial modes of a single ^{137}Ba^{+} ion to average motional occupations of 0.08(5) and 0.15(7), respectively. Using the same laser parameters, we also cool all the ten radial modes of a five-ion chain to near their ground states. Our approach can be adapted to atomic species possessing similar level structures. It allows engineering of the EIT Fano-like spectrum, which can be useful for simultaneous cooling of modes across a wide frequency range, aiding in large-scale trapped-ion quantum information processing.

Solving linear systems on quantum hardware with hybrid HHL++

The limited capabilities of current quantum hardware significantly constrain the scale of experimental demonstrations of most quantum algorithmic primitives. This makes it challenging to perform benchmarking of the current hardware using useful quantum algorithms, i.e., application-oriented benchmarking. In particular, the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) algorithm is a critical quantum linear algebra primitive, but the majority of the components of HHL are far out of the reach of noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, which has led to the proposal of hybrid classical-quantum variants. The goal of this work is to further bridge the gap between proposed near-term friendly implementations of HHL and the kinds of quantum circuits that can be executed on noisy hardware. Our proposal adds to the existing literature of hybrid quantum algorithms for linear algebra that are more compatible with the current scale of quantum devices. Specifically, we propose two modifications to the Hybrid HHL algorithm proposed by Lee et al., leading to our algorithm Hybrid HHL++\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\\hbox {HHL}^{++}$$\\end{document}: (1) propose a novel algorithm for determining a scaling factor for the linear system matrix that maximizes the utility of the amount of ancillary qubits allocated to the phase estimation component of HHL, and (2) introduce a heuristic for compressing the HHL circuit. We demonstrate the efficacy of our work by running our modified Hybrid HHL on Quantinuum System Model H-series trapped-ion quantum computers to solve different problem instances of small-scale portfolio optimization problems, leading to the largest experimental demonstrations of HHL for an application to date.

Enhancing the electron pair approximation with measurements on trapped-ion quantum computers

The electron pair approximation offers an efficient variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) approach for chemistry simulations on quantum computers. With the number of entangling gates scaling quadratically with system size and a constant measurement overhead, the orbital optimized unitary pair coupled cluster double (oo-upCCD) ansatz strikes a balance between accuracy and efficiency. However, the electron pair approximation prevents the method from achieving quantitative accuracy. To improve it, we explore the theory of second order perturbation (PT2) correction to oo-upCCD. PT2 accounts for the missing broken-pair contributions in oo-upCCD, while retaining its efficiencies. For molecular bond stretching and chemical reactions, the method significantly improves the predicted energy accuracy, reducing oo-upCCD’s error by up to 90%. On IonQ’s quantum computers, we find that the PT2 energy correction is highly noise-resilient. The predicted VQE-PT2 reaction energies are in excellent agreement with noise-free simulators after applying simple error mitigations solely on the VQE energies.

Demonstration of Fault-Tolerant Steane Quantum Error Correction

Encoding information redundantly using quantum error-correcting (QEC) codes allows one to overcome the inherent sensitivity to noise in quantum computers to ultimately achieve large-scale quantum computation. The Steane QEC method involves preparing an auxiliary logical qubit of the same QEC code as used for the data register. The data and auxiliary registers are then coupled with a logical controlled- () gate, enabling a measurement of the auxiliary register to reveal the error syndrome. This study presents the implementation of multiple rounds of fault-tolerant (FT) Steane QEC on a trapped-ion quantum computer. Various QEC codes are employed and the results are compared to a previous experimental approach utilizing flag qubits. Our experimental findings show improved logical fidelities for Steane QEC and accompanying numerical simulations indicate an even larger performance advantage for quantum processors limited by entangling-gate errors. This establishes experimental Steane QEC as a competitive paradigm for FT quantum computing. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Fault-tolerant one-bit addition with the smallest interesting color code.

Fault-tolerant operations based on stabilizer codes are the state of the art in suppressing error rates in quantum computations. Most such codes do not permit a straightforward implementation of non-Clifford logical operations, which are necessary to define a universal gate set. As a result, implementations of these operations must use either error-correcting codes with more complicated error correction procedures or gate teleportation and magic states, which are prepared at the logical level, increasing overhead to a degree that precludes near-term implementation. Here, we implement a small quantum algorithm, one-qubit addition, fault-tolerantly on a trapped-ion quantum computer, using the [Formula: see text] color code. By removing unnecessary error correction circuits and using low-overhead techniques for fault-tolerant preparation and measurement, we reduce the number of error-prone two-qubit gates and measurements to 36. We observe arithmetic errors with a rate of ∼1.1 × 10-3 for the fault-tolerant circuit and ∼9.5 × 10-3 for the unencoded circuit.

Ultra-narrow-linewidth hybrid-integrated self-injection locked laser at 780 nm

Narrow-linewidth lasers are essential across a wide range of applications, including classical and quantum sensing, trapped ion systems, position/navigation/timing systems, optical clocks, and microwave frequency synthesizers. In the visible and near-visible spectrum, low-noise lasers are particularly important for laser trapping and cooling techniques, which are vital for trapped ion quantum computing, sensing, and atomic clocks. In this context, our work showcases a hybrid-integrated narrow-linewidth laser that operates at 780 nm, achieving a self-heterodyne linewidth of 105 Hz. To validate the experimental results, we performed a numerical analysis that combines insights from a many-body theory applied to the gain region with a travelling-wave model to capture the laser dynamics. Our investigation further delves into how the linewidth of the self-injection locked lasers is influenced by the parameters of micro-ring resonators, aiming to assess the potential for achieving Hz-level integrated laser linewidths at 780 nm. This work not only demonstrates the technical feasibility of Hz-level narrow-linewidth lasers but also lays the groundwork for future explorations in the field.

Versatile Fidelity Estimation with Confidence.

As quantum devices become more complex and the requirements on these devices become more demanding, it is crucial to be able to verify the performance of such devices in a scalable and reliable fashion. A cornerstone task in this challenge is quantifying how close an experimentally prepared quantum state is to the desired one. Here we present a method to construct an estimator for the quantum state fidelity that is compatible with any measurement protocol. Our method provides a confidence interval on this estimator that is guaranteed to be nearly minimax optimal for the specified measurement protocol. For a well-chosen measurement scheme, our method is competitive in the number of measurement outcomes required for estimation. We demonstrate our method using simulations and experimental data from a trapped-ion quantum computer and compare the results to state-of-the-art techniques. Our method can be easily extended to estimate the expectation value of any observable, such as entanglement witnesses.

Topological order from measurements and feed-forward on a trapped ion quantum computer

Quantum systems evolve in time in one of two ways: through the Schrödinger equation or wavefunction collapse. So far, deterministic control of quantum many-body systems in the lab has focused on the former, due to the probabilistic nature of measurements. This imposes serious limitations: preparing long-range entangled states, for example, requires extensive circuit depth if restricted to unitary dynamics. In this work, we use mid-circuit measurement and feed-forward to implement deterministic non-unitary dynamics on Quantinuum’s H1 programmable ion-trap quantum computer. Enabled by these capabilities, we demonstrate a constant-depth procedure for creating a toric code ground state in real-time. In addition to reaching high stabilizer fidelities, we create a non-Abelian defect whose presence is confirmed by transmuting anyons via braiding. This work clears the way towards creating complex topological orders in the lab and exploring deterministic non-unitary dynamics via measurement and feed-forward.

Arbitrary quantum circuits on a fully integrated two-qubit computation register for a trapped-ion quantum processor

We report on the implementation of arbitrary circuits on a universal two-qubit register that can act as the computational module in a trapped-ion quantum computer based on the quantum charge-coupled device architecture. A universal set of quantum gates is implemented on a two-ion Coulomb crystal of Be+9 ions using only chip-integrated microwave addressing. Individual-ion addressing is implemented using microwave micromotion sideband transitions; we obtain upper limits on addressing crosstalk in the register. Arbitrary two-qubit operations are characterized using the cycle benchmarking protocol. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Trapped Ion Quantum Computing: A Framework for Addressing Security Vulnerabilities

Trapped ion quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize computational paradigms. As the adoption of this technology grows, so does the need for stringent scrutiny of its involvement in cybersecurity, especially when it has implications in national defense or critical infrastructure. While trapped ion quantum computing offers transformative capabilities, it is vital to carefully examine the potential vulnerabilities associated with its use and patch them before implementing this powerful technology. In this paper, we examine the potential vulnerabilities in trapped ion quantum computing systems and propose a framework for addressing them. This framework includes risk assessment for evaluating vulnerabilities, threat modeling for identifying exploits, and prevention and mitigation for reducing their impact.

Quantum support vector machines for classification and regression on a trapped-ion quantum computer

Quantum machine learning is a rapidly growing field at the intersection of quantum computing and machine learning. In this work, we examine our quantum machine learning models, which are based on quantum support vector classification (QSVC) and quantum support vector regression (QSVR). We investigate these models using a quantum circuit simulator, both with and without noise, as well as the IonQ Harmony quantum processor. For the QSVC tasks, we use a dataset containing fraudulent credit card transactions and image datasets (the MNIST and the Fashion-MNIST datasets); for the QSVR tasks, we use a financial dataset and a materials dataset. For the classification tasks, the performance of our QSVC models using 4 qubits of the trapped-ion quantum computer was comparable to that obtained from noiseless quantum circuit simulations. The result is consistent with the analysis of our device noise simulations with varying qubit gate error rates. For the regression tasks, applying a low-rank approximation to the noisy quantum kernel, in combination with hyperparameter tuning in ε-SVR, improved the performance of the QSVR models on the near-term quantum device. The alignment, as measured by the Frobenius inner product between the noiseless and noisy quantum kernels, can serve as an indicator of the relative prediction performance on noisy quantum devices in comparison with their ideal counterparts. Our results suggest that the quantum kernel, as described by our shallow quantum circuit, can be effectively used for both QSVC and QSVR tasks, indicating its resistance to noise and its adaptability to various datasets.

Bilayer ion trap design for 2D arrays

Junctions are fundamental elements that support qubit locomotion in two-dimensional ion trap arrays and enhance connectivity in emerging trapped-ion quantum computers. In surface ion traps they have typically been implemented by shaping radio frequency (RF) electrodes in a single plane to minimize the disturbance to the pseudopotential. However, this method introduces issues related to RF lead routing that can increase power dissipation and the likelihood of voltage breakdown. Here, we propose and simulate a novel two-layer junction design incorporating two perpendicularly rotoreflected (rotated, then reflected) linear ion traps. The traps are vertically separated, and create a trapping potential between their respective planes. The orthogonal orientation of the RF electrodes of each trap relative to the other provides perpendicular axes of confinement that can be used to realize transport in two dimensions. While this design introduces manufacturing and operating challenges, as now two separate structures have to be precisely positioned relative to each other in the vertical direction and optical access from the top is obscured, it obviates the need to route RF leads below the top surface of the trap and eliminates the pseudopotential bumps that occur in typical junctions. In this paper the stability of idealized ion transfer in the new configuration is demonstrated, both by solving the Mathieu equation analytically to identify the stable regions and by numerically modeling ion dynamics. Our novel junction layout has the potential to enhance the flexibility of microfabricated ion trap control to enable large-scale trapped-ion quantum computing.

Pulse optimization for high-precision motional-mode characterization in trapped-ion quantum computers

High-fidelity operation of quantum computers requires precise knowledge of the physical system through characterization. For motion-mediated entanglement generation in trapped ions, it is crucial to have precise knowledge of the motional-mode parameters such as the mode frequencies and the Lamb–Dicke parameters. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art mode-characterization schemes do not easily render the mode parameters in a sufficiently accurate and efficient fashion for large-scale devices, due to the unwanted excitation of adjacent modes in the frequency space when targeting a single mode, an effect known as the cross-mode coupling. Here, we develop an alternative scheme that leverages the degrees of freedom in pulse design for the characterization experiment such that the effects of the cross-mode coupling is actively silenced. Further, we devise stabilization methods to accurately characterize the Lamb–Dicke parameters even when the mode frequencies are not precisely known due to experimental drifts or characterization inaccuracies. We extensively benchmark our scheme in simulations of a three-ion chain and discuss the parameter regimes in which the shaped pulses significantly outperform the traditional square pulses.

Estimation of Electrostatic Interaction Energies on a Trapped-Ion Quantum Computer.

We present the first hardware implementation of electrostatic interaction energies by using a trapped-ion quantum computer. As test system for our computation, we focus on the reduction of NO to N2O catalyzed by a nitric oxide reductase (NOR). The quantum computer is used to generate an approximate ground state within the NOR active space. To efficiently measure the necessary one-particle density matrices, we incorporate fermionic basis rotations into the quantum circuit without extending the circuit length, laying the groundwork for further efficient measurement routines using factorizations. Measurements in the computational basis are then used as inputs for computing the electrostatic interaction energies on a classical computer. Our experimental results strongly agree with classical noise-less simulations of the same circuits, finding electrostatic interaction energies within chemical accuracy despite hardware noise. This work shows that algorithms tailored to specific observables of interest, such as interaction energies, may require significantly fewer quantum resources than individual ground state energies would require in the straightforward supermolecular approach.

Penning micro-trap for quantum computing.

Trapped ions in radio-frequency traps are among the leading approaches for realizing quantum computers, because of high-fidelity quantum gates and long coherence times1-3. However, the use of radio-frequencies presents several challenges to scaling, including requiring compatibility of chips with high voltages4, managing power dissipation5 and restricting transport and placement of ions6. Here we realize a micro-fabricated Penning ion trap that removes these restrictions by replacing the radio-frequency field with a 3T magnetic field. We demonstrate full quantum control of an ion in this setting, as well as the ability to transport the ion arbitrarily in the trapping plane above the chip. This unique feature of the Penning micro-trap approach opens up a modification of the quantum charge-coupled device architecture with improved connectivity and flexibility, facilitating the realization of large-scale trapped-ion quantum computing, quantum simulation and quantum sensing.

A simplified Mølmer–Sørensen gate for the trapped ion quantum computer

We discuss how to simplify the Mølmer–Sørensen (MS) gate which is used for the trapped ion quantum computer. The original MS gate is implemented by illuminating two ions with bichromatic coherent light fields separately at the same time. In this paper, we propose a method for transforming a separable state of two ions into one of the Bell states by illuminating the two ions with monochromatic coherent light fields individually and this point is the advantage of our scheme over the original MS gate. The length of the execution time of our proposed gate is comparable to that of the original MS gate, however, numerical calculations show that our proposed gate is weakly sensitive to thermal fluctuations of the phonons. By giving another example of a simple two-ion gate that can generate entanglement but is strongly vulnerable to thermal fluctuations, we show that our simplified MS gate is more marked than usual.

Construction of two-qubit gates using B Gate

Abstract In the circuit model of quantum computation, an entangling two-qubit gate and a set of single-qubit gates are used as universal gate set or basis gates for doing quantum computation. CNOT and iSWAP gates, the perfect entanglers that can create maximally entangled two-qubit states in one application, are broadly used entangling two-qubit basis gates in quantum computers. In this paper, we analyze the potentiality of B gate, an unexplored non-perfect entangler of the form, exp i π ( σ ˆ x ⨂ σ ˆ x ) 8 + i π ( σ ˆ y ⨂ σ ˆ y ) 16 , as an entangling two-qubit basis gate in quantum computers by studying its ability to generate other two-qubit gates. We derive a necessary condition for a two-qubit gate to be generated by n applications of B gate. Using this condition, we show that the gates that can be generated by two and three applications of B gate are contained in the 50% and 92.97% of the volume of Weyl chamber of two-qubit gates, respectively. We prove that two applications of B gate can generate both SWAP and SWAP † which is not possible for CNOT and iSWAP gates; further, we conjecture that three applications of B gate can generate all perfect entanglers. Finally, we discuss about the construction of a three independent parameter universal two-qubit quantum circuit using four B gates that can generate all two-qubit gates. In the end, we mention about the schemes to implement B gate in ion-trap quantum computers.

Quantum state preparation of normal distributions using matrix product states

State preparation is a necessary component of many quantum algorithms. In this work, we combine a method for efficiently representing smooth differentiable probability distributions using matrix product states with recently discovered techniques for initializing quantum states to approximate matrix product states. Using this, we generate quantum states encoding a class of normal probability distributions in a trapped ion quantum computer for up to 20 qubits. We provide an in depth analysis of the different sources of error which contribute to the overall fidelity of this state preparation procedure. Our work provides a study in quantum hardware for scalable distribution loading, which is the basis of a wide range of algorithms that provide quantum advantage.