Towards Dual-Isotope Entangling Gates for Trapped-Ion Quantum Computing

Abstract

Entangling gates are essential to the development in the capabilities of any trapped-ion quantum computer. High-fidelity entangling gates have previously been demonstrated on trapped-ion quantum hardware with single species ion chains. We propose a dual-species entangling gate scheme with two different isotopes of barium, namely 137Ba+ and 133Ba+, which would lend itself better to a scalable entangling gate scheme than single or even dual-species architectures. This thesis presents the necessary background to understand entangling gate schemes on trapped-ion systems and how this translates to a dual-isotope infrastructure. The motional mode structure of several dual-isotope ion-chains is calculated and compared against its dual and single species counterparts. It also presents all of the work done to date towards implementing these gates experimentally, including developing an isotope-selective ion-trap loading process and building the necessary infrastructure towards getting 137Ba ions to behave as qubits.