Derek Stacey

Abstract:

We describe the fabrication and characterization of a new surface-electrode Paul ion trap designed for experiments in scalable quantum information processing with Ca+. A notable feature is a symmetric electrode pattern which allows rotation of the normal modes of ion motion, yielding efficient Doppler cooling with a single beam parallel to the planar surface. We propose and implement a technique for micromotion compensation in all directions using an infrared repumper laser beam directed into the trap plane. Finally, we employ an alternate repumping scheme that increases ion fluorescence and simplifies heating rate measurements obtained by time-resolved ion fluorescence during Doppler cooling.

Abstract:

We demonstrate sympathetic cooling of a C 43 a+ trapped-ion "memory" qubit by a C 40 a+ "coolant" ion sufficiently near the ground state of motion for fault-tolerant quantum logic, while maintaining coherence of the qubit. This is an essential ingredient in trapped-ion quantum computers. The isotope shifts are sufficient to suppress decoherence and phase shifts of the memory qubit due to the cooling light which illuminates both ions. We measure the qubit coherence during ten cycles of sideband cooling, finding a coherence loss of 3.3% per cooling cycle. The natural limit of the method is O (10-4) infidelity per cooling cycle. © 2009 The American Physical Society.

Abstract:

We demonstrate single-shot qubit readout with a fidelity sufficient for fault-tolerant quantum computation. For an optical qubit stored in Ca-40(+) we achieve 99.991(1)% average readout fidelity in 10(6) trials, using time-resolved photon counting. An adaptive measurement technique allows 99.99% fidelity to be reached in 145 mu s average detection time. For Ca-43(+), we propose and implement an optical pumping scheme to transfer a long-lived hyperfine qubit to the optical qubit, capable of a theoretical fidelity of 99.95% in 10 mu s. We achieve 99.87(4)% transfer fidelity and 99.77(3)% net readout fidelity.