Southwest Quantum Information and Technology

Quantum Algorithm Demonstrations on a Fully Reconfigurable Ion Trap Quantum Computer

Presenting Author: Norbert Linke, Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland Department of Physics and National Institute of Standards and Technology, College Park, Maryland 20742
Contributing Author(s): Shantanu Debnath, Caroline Figgatt, Kevin Landsman, Ken Wright and Chris Monroe

Trapped ions are a highly advanced platform for implementing quantum circuits. They provide standard pairs of magnetic field insensitive "atomic clock" states as qubits with unsurpassed coherence times and optical schemes for near-unity preparation and measurement, as well as strong Coulomb interactions to generate entanglement. We present a modular architecture comprised of a chain of trapped 171Yb+ ions with individual Raman beam addressing and individual readout. We employ a pulse-shaping scheme [1] to use the transverse modes of motion in the chain to produce entangling gates between any qubit pair. This creates a fully connected system which can be configured to run any sequence of single- and two-qubit gates, making it in effect an arbitrarily programmable quantum computer. To demonstrate the universality of this setup, we present experimental results from three different quantum algorithms on five ions: 1. The Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm which allows the single-shot determination of an oracle function. 2. The Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm to discriminate a constant from a balanced function from a single evaluation, and 3. The Quantum Fourier Transform which we use to implement a Phase Estimation as well as a Period Finding protocol, the latter being a key ingredient in prime factorization.

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