Benchmarking a high-fidelity mixed-species entangling gate
Abstract:
We implement a two-qubit logic gate between a 43Ca+ hyperfine qubit and a 88Sr+ Zeeman qubit. For this pair of ion species, the S–P optical transitions are close enough that a single laser of wavelength 402 nm can be used to drive the gate but sufficiently well separated to give good spectral isolation and low photon scattering errors. We characterize the gate by full randomized benchmarking, gate set tomography, and Bell state analysis. The latter method gives a fidelity of 99.8(1)%, comparable to that of the best same-species gates and consistent with known sources of error.High-rate high-fidelity entanglement of qubits across an elementary quantum network
Abstract:
We demonstrate remote entanglement of trapped-ion qubits via a quantum-optical fiber link with fidelity and rate approaching those of local operations. Two 88Sr+ qubits are entangled via the polarization degree of freedom of two spontaneously emitted 422 nm photons which are coupled by high-numerical-aperture lenses into single-mode optical fibers and interfere on a beam splitter. A novel geometry allows high-efficiency photon collection while maintaining unit fidelity for ion-photon entanglement. We generate heralded Bell pairs with fidelity 94% at an average rate 182 s−1 (success probability 2.18×10−4).
Probing qubit memory errors at the part-per-million level
Abstract:
Robust qubit memory is essential for quantum computing, both for near-term devices operating without error correction, and for the long-term goal of a fault-tolerant processor. We directly measure the memory error εm for a 43Ca+ trapped-ion qubit in the small-error regime and find εm<10−4 for storage times t ≲ 50 ms. This exceeds gate or measurement times by three orders of magnitude. Using randomized benchmarking, at t = 1 ms we measure εm=1.2(7)×10−6, around ten times smaller than that extrapolated from the T∗2 time, and limited by instability of the atomic clock reference used to benchmark the qubit.