Scalable Multispecies Ion Transport in a Grid-Based Surface-Electrode Trap

Abstract

Quantum processors based on linear arrays of trapped ions have achieved exceptional performance, but scaling to large qubit numbers requires realizing two-dimensional ion arrays as envisioned in the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architecture. Here, we present a scalable method for the control of ion crystals in a grid-based surface-electrode Paul trap and characterize it in the context of transport operations that sort and reorder multispecies crystals. By combining cowiring of control electrodes at translationally symmetric locations in each grid site with the sitewise ability to exchange the voltages applied to two special electrodes gated by a binary input, site-dependent operations can be achieved using only a fixed number of analog voltage signals and a single digital input per site. In two separate experimental systems containing nominally identical grid traps, one using 171Yb+−138Ba+ crystals and the other 137Ba+−88Sr+, we demonstrate this method by characterizing the conditional intrasite crystal reorder and the conditional exchange of ions between adjacent sites on the grid. Averaged across a multisite region of interest, we measure subquanta motional excitation in the axial in-phase and out-of-phase modes of the crystals following these operations at exchange rates of 2.5 kHz. In this initial demonstration, the logic controlling the voltage exchange occurs in software, but the applied signals mimic a proposed hardware implementation using crossover switches. These techniques can be further extended to implement other conditional operations in the QCCD architecture such as gates, initialization, and measurement.