Southwest Quantum Information and Technology

Flexible experimental control for high-fidelity trapped-ion quantum information

Presenting Author: Vlad Negnevitsky, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich
Contributing Author(s): Matteo Marinelli, David Nadlinger, Ludwig de Clercq, Christa Fluehmann, Robin Oswald, Hsiang-Yu Lo, Daniel Kienzler, Ben Keitch, Jonathan Home

We present a new experimental control system, developed for high-fidelity quantum information experiments using calcium and beryllium ions. It features a fast real-time processor programmed in C++, tightly integrated with several FPGA-based peripherals that implement digital inputs and outputs with a time resolution of 8 ns, synthesise phase-coherent rf up to 400 MHz, and produce arbitrary time-varying electrode voltages with 300 uV resolution. The system has been used to carry out two-qubit gates at fidelities above 98%, along with experiments in dissipative state preparation and fast ion transport. It can also conditionally carry out operations based on in-sequence measurements, which has been used in a heralded measurement scheme as part of tomographically reconstructing the Wigner function of a Schroedinger cat state [1]. The available processing power allows the system to run complex real-time computational algorithms, such as Bayesian phase estimation, whose speed is limited by qubit operation times rather than classical processing delays. We thank the Swiss National Fund and ETH Zurich for financial support. [1] Kienzler et al, arXiv:1512.01838 (2015)

Read this article online: http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01838

(Session 5 : Thursday from 5:00 - 7:00 pm)