Trapped ions are a promising tool for building a large-scale quantum computer. However, the number of required radiation fields for the realisation of quantum gates in any proposed ion-based architecture scales with the number of ions within the quantum computer, posing a major obstacle when imagining a device with millions of ions. Here we present a fundamentally different concept for trapped-ion quantum computing where this detrimental scaling entirely vanishes, replacing millions of radiation fields with only a handful of fields. The method is based on individually controlled voltages applied to each logic gate location to facilitate the actual gate operation analogous to a traditional transistor architecture within a classical computer processor. To demonstrate the key principle of this approach we implement a versatile quantum gate method based on long-wavelength radiation and use this method to generate a maximally entangled state of two quantum engineered clock-qubits with fidelity 0.985(12). This quantum gate also constitutes a simple-to-implement tool for quantum metrology, sensing and simulation.
@article{arxiv.1603.03384,
title = {Trapped-ion quantum logic with global radiation fields},
author = {S. Weidt and J. Randall and S. C. Webster and K. Lake and A. E. Webb and I. Cohen and T. Navickas and B. Lekitsch and A. Retzker and W. K. Hensinger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.03384},
year = {2016}
}