Scalable quantum computing stabilised by optical tweezers on an ion crystal

Abstract

As it has been demonstrated that trapped ion systems have unmatched long-lived quantum-bit (qubit) coherence and can support high-fidelity quantum manipulations, how to scale up the system size becomes an inevitable task for practical purposes. In this work, we theoretically analyse the physical limitation of scalability with a trapped ion array, and propose a feasible scheme of architecture that in principle allows an arbitrary number of ion qubits, for which the overhead only scales linearly with the system size. This scheme relies on the combined ideas of a trap architecture of tunable size, stabilisation of an ion crystal by optical tweezers, and continuous sympathetic cooling without touching the stored information. We demonstrate that illumination of optical tweezers modifies the motional spectrum by effectively pinning the ions, lifting the frequencies of the motional ground modes. By doing so, we make the structure of the array less vulnerable from thermal excitations, and suppress the position fluctuations to insure faithful gate operations. Finally, we also explore the local behaviour of cooling when a sub-array is isolated by optical tweezers from other parts of the crystal.