A trapped-ion pair may help scale up quantum computers
Of the many divergent approaches to building a practical quantum computer, one of the most promising paths leads toward ion traps. In these traps, single ions are held still and serve as the basic units of data, or qubits, of the computer. With the help of lasers, these qubits interact with each other to perform logic operations. Lab experiments with small numbers of trapped ions work well, but a lot of work remains in figuring out the basic parts of a scalable ion-trap quantum computer. What kind of ions should be used? What technologies will be able to control, manipulate, and read out the quantum information stored in those ions? Toward answering these questions, MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers have turned to a promising pair: ions of calcium (Ca) and strontium (Sr). In a paper published in npj Quantum Information, the team describes using these ions to perform quantum logic operations and...