Bilayer crystals of trapped ions for quantum information processing

Published

August 16, 2024

Author(s)

Samarth Hawalder, Prakriti Shahi, Allison Carter, Ana Rey Ayala, John J. Bollinger, Athreya Shankar

Abstract

Trapped ion systems are a leading platform for quantum information processing, but they are currently limited to 1D and 2D arrays, which imposes restrictions on both their scalability and their range of applications. Here, we propose a path to overcome this limitation by demonstrating that Penning traps can be used to realize remarkably clean bilayer crystals, wherein hundreds of ions self-organize into two well-defined layers. These bilayer crystals are made possible by the inclusion of an anharmonic trapping potential, which is readily implementable with current technology. We study the normal modes of this system and discover striking differences compared to the modes of single-plane crystals. The bilayer geometry and the unique properties of the normal modes open new opportunities in quantum information processing that are not straightforward in single-plane crystals. Furthermore, we illustrate that it may be possible to extend the ideas presented here to realize multilayer crystals with more than two layers. Our work increases the dimensionality of trapped ion systems by efficiently utilizing all three spatial dimensions and lays the foundation for a new generation of quantum information processing experiments with multilayer 3D crystals of trapped ions.

Citation

Physical Review X

Volume

14

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.031030

Local Download

Keywords

bilayer ion crystals, chiral spin exchange, Penning trap, quantum sensing, quantum simulation, three dimensional ion crystals, trapped-ion crystals

Citation

Hawalder, S. , Shahi, P. , Carter, A. , Rey Ayala, A. , Bollinger, J. and Shankar, A. (2024), Bilayer crystals of trapped ions for quantum information processing, Physical Review X, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.031030, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=957082 (Accessed February 5, 2025)