Experimental Realization of Direct Entangling Gates between Dual-Type Qubits

Dual-type qubits have become a promising way to suppress the crosstalk error of auxiliary operations in large-scale ion trap quantum computation. Here we demonstrate a direct entangling gate between dual-type qubits encoded in the S_{1/2} and D_{5/2} hyperfine manifolds of ^{137}Ba^{+} ions. Our scheme is economic in the hardware, requiring only a single 532 nm laser system to entangle both qubit types by driving their Raman transitions. We achieve a Bell state fidelity of 96.3(4)% for the dual-type Molmer-Sorensen gate between an S-D ion pair, comparable to that for the same-type S-S or D-D gates. This technique can reduce the overhead for back-and-forth conversions between dual-type qubits in the quantum circuit with wide applications in quantum error correction and ion-photon quantum networks.