Reconfigurable and Programmable Ion Trap Quantum Computer

Abstract

We present progress on the construction and operation of a room- temperature quantum computer built with trapped atomic ion qubits. Based on the technological underpinnings of atomic clocks that define time, atomic qubits are standards of quantum information because they are all identical. They present a fundamentally scalable approach to quantum computation where interactions can be faithfully replicated and measured with near-perfect efficiency. Moreover, the connection among atomic ion qubits are forged from external laser beams and mediated by the Coulomb repulsion between them, and hence behave as a fully reconfigurable quantum circuit, much like an FPGA in classical computation. We further discuss paths to scaling using demonstrated technologies that are unique to this class of quantum computation devices. This flexibility will likely allow ion trap quantum computers to express the superset of all known quantum computation operations, and thus efficiently target any type of application that arises.