Southwest Quantum Information and Technology

Rapid exchange cooling with calcium ions

Presenting Author: Spencer Fallek, Georgia Tech Research Institute
Contributing Author(s): Vikram Sandhu, Ryan McGill, Holly Tinkey, Craig Clark, Kenton Brown

In trapped ion quantum information, maintaining low ion temperature of computational ions is key to performing high fidelity gates. However, sympathetic cooling, the current standard in the field, is both slow and experimentally complex. In this work, we experimentally study the technique of exchange cooling. The protocol utilizes a bank of cold ions to cool the hotter computational ions. Both the coolant and computational ions are of the same atomic species. The Coulomb interaction mediates an energy exchange between a coolant ion and a computational ion. However, the rate of exchange depends strongly on the distance between the two ions. Here, we execute the scheme, targeting an exchange rate which achieves cooling times on the order of gate execution times. Additionally, we investigate the concept of cooling through a merge, whereby the ions are brought into the same harmonic potential well and then split apart.

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