Modular entanglement of atomic qubits using photons and phonons

By D. Hucul, I. V. Inlek, G. Vittorini, C. Crocker, Shantanu Debnath, S. Clark, Christopher R. Monroe. Nature Physics, 2014

327 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many quantum protocols require fast, remote entanglement generation to outperform their classical counterparts. A modular solution is now reported, using trapped ions that are remotely entangled through photons. Quantum entanglement is the central resource behind quantum information science, from quantum computation and simulation1,2 to enhanced metrology3 and secure communication1. These applications require the quantum control of large networks of qubits to realize gains and speed increases over conventional devices. However, propagating entanglement becomes difficult or impossible as the system grows in size. Here, we demonstrate the first step in a modular approach4 to scaling entanglement by using complementary quantum buses on a collection of three atomic ion qubits stored in two remote ion trap modules. Entanglement within a module is achieved with deterministic near-field interactions through phonons5, and remote entanglement between modules is achieved with a probabilistic interaction through photons6. This minimal system allows us to address generic issues in the synchronization of entanglement with multiple buses. It points the way towards a modular large-scale quantum information architecture that promises less spectral crowding and thus potentially less decoherence as the number of qubits increases4. We generate this modular entanglement faster than the observed remotely entangled qubit-decoherence rate, showing that entanglement can be scaled simply by adding more modules.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/01d8b233b244318ecb7e9ebe79c06eda9552f179

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Citations in the corpus

On-demand quantum state transfer and entanglement between remote microwave cavity memories (2017, background): “The demonstration of remote entanglement generation at a rate exceeding the memory loss rates satisfies an essential requirement for scalable quantum communication and distributed computation 33 .”
Demonstration of the trapped-ion quantum CCD computer architecture (2020, background): “on architectures that use either a network of ion crystals connected through photonic links [12, 13] or physically transporting ions between different crystals [14, 15] and eventually even across trap modules [16].”
Generation of heralded entanglement between distant hole spins (2015, result): “Thanks to the long coherence time of hole spins and the efficient spin-photon interface provided by self-assembled quantum dots [10–12] embedded in leaky microcavity structures, we generate 2300 entangled spin pairs per second, which represents an improvement approaching three orders of magnitude as”
Quantum internet: A vision for the road ahead (2018, background): “However, cross-talk caused by unwanted couplings or imperfect individual addressability can severely affect the coherence of a memory qubit under operations on another qubit in the same node (79, 80).”
Freely Scalable Quantum Technologies using Cells of 5-to-50 Qubits with Very Lossy and Noisy Photonic Links (2014, methodology): “The anti-bunching scheme employed by Monroe’s group in [8] has a similar form R M ∼ (1 − p loss ) 2 .”
Deterministic delivery of remote entanglement on a quantum network (2017, background): “The combination of dynamical decoupling with the single-photon entanglement protocol achieves a quantum link efficiency of η link ∼ 8 (comparable to the published state-of-the-art in ion traps, η link ∼ 5 [8]), pushing the NV-based platform well beyond the critical threshold of η link & 0.”
Development of Quantum Interconnects (QuICs) for Next-Generation Information Technologies (2021, background): “Quantum memories: The major challenge for the first generation of quantum repeaters is the development of long-lived quantum memories with efficient optical interfaces, such as addressable color center nuclear spins with integrated nanophotonics [71], trapped-atomic qubits with Purcell-enhanced e”