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Photon-Interfaced Ten-Qubit Register of Trapped Ions
M Canteri1, Z X Koong1, J Bate1
1Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Experimentalphysik, Technikerstrasse 25, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria.
Physical Review Letters
|September 10, 2025
Summary
Researchers developed a method to entangle individual ion qubits with photons, creating photonic qubits for scalable quantum networks. This breakthrough advances quantum computing and communication technologies.
Area of Science:
- Quantum Information Science
- Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
Background:
- Scalable quantum computing necessitates efficient interfaces between quantum processors and photons.
- Developing reliable methods for entangling matter qubits with photonic qubits is crucial for quantum networks.
Purpose of the Study:
- To demonstrate a technique for entangling individual matter qubits within a register with separate traveling photons.
- To establish an efficient interface between multiqubit registers and photonic qubits.
Main Methods:
- Utilizing a string of ten co-trapped atomic ions as matter qubits.
- Employing a laser-driven cavity-mediated Raman transition to couple ion qubits to an optical cavity.
- Sequentially bringing ions into the optical cavity to emit entangled photons via controlled trap confinement.
Main Results:
- Successfully generated a train of photonic qubits, each entangled with a distinct ion qubit.
- Achieved an average ion-photon Bell state fidelity of 92%.
- Obtained an average single-photon detection probability of 9%.
Conclusions:
- The demonstrated technique is scalable to larger ion-qubit registers.
- This method paves the way for entangling distributed networks of trapped-ion quantum processors.
- Enables near-term applications in quantum sensing and synchronized atomic clocks.
