Mid-circuit measurement and reset are crucial primitives in quantum computation, but such operations require strong interactions with selected qubits while maintaining isolation of neighboring qubits, which is a significant challenge in many systems.
For trapped ion systems, measurement is performed with laser-induced fluorescence. Stray light from the detection beam and fluorescence from the measured ions can be significant sources of decoherence for unmeasured qubits. We present a technique using ion micromotion to reduce these sources of decoherence by over an order of magnitude. We benchmark the performance with a new method, based on randomized benchmarking, to estimate the magnitude of crosstalk errors on nearby qubits. Using the Honeywell System Model H0, we demonstrate measurement and reset on select qubits with low crosstalk errors on neighboring qubits.
To date, the highest fidelity quantum logic gates between two qubits have been achieved with variations on the geometric-phase gate in trapped ions, with the two leading variants being the Molmer-Sorensen gate and the light-shift (LS) gate. Both of t
hese approaches have their respective advantages and challenges. For example, the latter is technically simpler and is natively insensitive to optical phases, but it has not been made to work directly on a clock-state qubit. We present a new technique for implementing the LS gate that combines the best features of these two approaches: By using a small ($sim {rm MHz}$) detuning from a narrow (dipole-forbidden) optical transition, we are able to operate an LS gate directly on hyperfine clock states, achieving gate fidelities of $99.74(4)%$ using modest laser power at visible wavelengths. Current gate infidelities appear to be dominated by technical noise, and theoretical modeling suggests a path towards gate fidelity above $99.99%$.
We present a new and simplified two-qubit randomized benchmarking procedure that operates only in the symmetric subspace of a pair of qubits and is well suited for benchmarking trapped-ion systems. By performing benchmarking only in the symmetric sub
space, we drastically reduce the experimental complexity, number of gates required, and run time. The protocol is demonstrated on trapped ions using collective single-qubit rotations and the Molmer-Sorenson (MS) interaction to estimate an entangling gate error of $2(1) times 10^{-3}$. We analyze the expected errors in the MS gate and find that population remains mostly in the symmetric subspace. The errors that mix symmetric and anti-symmetric subspaces appear as leakage and we characterize them by combining our protocol with recently proposed leakage benchmarking. Generalizations and limitations of the protocol are also discussed.
Quantum tomography is a critically important tool to evaluate quantum hardware, making it essential to develop optimized measurement strategies that are both accurate and efficient. We compare a variety of strategies using nearly pure test states. Th
ose that are informationally complete for all states are found to be accurate and reliable even in the presence of errors in the measurements themselves, while those designed to be complete only for pure states are far more efficient but highly sensitive to such errors. Our results highlight the unavoidable tradeoffs inherent to quantum tomography.
