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Updated: Jan 5, 2026

Experimental Methods for Trapping Ions Using Microfabricated Surface Ion Traps
Published on: August 17, 2017
Modular quantum computation in a trapped ion system
Kuan Zhang1,2, Jayne Thompson3, Xiang Zhang4,5
1Center for Quantum Information, Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, 100084, Beijing, China. zhangkuan13@gmail.com.
Abstract:
Modern computation relies crucially on modular architectures, breaking a complex algorithm into self-contained subroutines. A client can then call upon a remote server to implement parts of the computation independently via an application programming interface (API). Present APIs relay only classical information. Here we implement a quantum API that enables a client to estimate the absolute value of the trace of a server-provided unitary operation [Formula: see text]. We demonstrate that the algorithm functions correctly irrespective of what unitary [Formula: see text] the server implements or how the server specifically realizes [Formula: see text]. Our experiment involves pioneering techniques to coherently swap qubits encoded within the motional states of a trapped [Formula: see text] ion, controlled on its hyperfine state. This constitutes the first demonstration of modular computation in the quantum regime, providing a step towards scalable, parallelization of quantum computation.
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