English

Fast design and scaling of multi-qubit gates in large-scale trapped-ion quantum computers

Quantum Physics 2026-01-26 v2

Abstract

Quantum computers based on crystals of trapped ions are a prominent technology for quantum computation. A unique feature of trapped ions is their long-range Coulomb interactions, which can be exploited to realize large-scale multiqubit entanglement gates. However, scaling up the number of qubits, NN, in these systems, while retaining high-fidelity and high-speed operations, is challenging. Specifically, designing multiqubit entanglement gates in long ion crystals of hundreds of ions involves an NP-hard optimization problem, rendering scale-up not only a technological challenge, but also a conceptual challenge. Here we introduce a method that mitigates this challenge, effectively allowing for a polynomial-time design of fast, robust, and programmable entanglement gates, acting on the entire ion-crystal. We show that while the number of simultaneous entanglement operations scales as N2N^2, the gate duration scales as NN, leading to a scaling advantage. We use our methods to investigate the drive-power requirements and susceptibility to noise and errors of these multiqubit gates. Our method delineates a path towards scaling up quantum computers based on ion-crystals with hundreds of qubits.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.09566,
  title  = {Fast design and scaling of multi-qubit gates in large-scale trapped-ion quantum computers},
  author = {Lee Peleg and David Schwerdt and Jonathan Nemirovsky and Yotam Shapira and Nitzan Akerman and Ady Stern and Amit Ben Kish and Roee Ozeri},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09566},
  year   = {2026}
}