Comparison of Spontaneous Emission in Trapped Ion Multiqubit Gates at High Magnetic Fields

Abstract

Penning traps have been used for performing quantum simulations and sensing with hundreds of ions and provide a promising route toward scaling up trapped ion quantum platforms because of the ability to trap and control up to thousands of ions in 2D and 3D crystals. A leading source of decoherence in laser-based multiqubit operations on trapped ions is off-resonant spontaneous emission. While many trapped ion quantum computers or simulators utilize clock qubits, other systems rely on Zeeman qubits, which require a more complex calculation of this decoherence. We examine theoretically the impacts of spontaneous emission on quantum gates performed with trapped ions in a high magnetic field. We consider two types of gates -- light-shift and Molmer-Sorensen gates -- and compare the decoherence errors in each. We also compare different detunings, polarizations, and required intensities of the laser beams used to drive the gates. We show that both gates can have similar performance at their optimal operating conditions and examine the experimental feasibility of various operating points. By examining the magnetic field dependence of each gate, we demonstrate that when the $P$ state fine structure splitting is large compared to the Zeeman splittings, the theoretical performance of the Molmer-Sorensen gate is significantly better than that of the light-shift gate. Additionally, for the light-shift gate, we make an approximate comparison between the fidelities that can be achieved at high fields with the fidelities of state-of-the-art two-qubit trapped ion quantum gates. We show that, with regard to spontaneous emission, the achievable infidelity of our current configuration is about an order of magnitude larger than that of the best low-field gates, but we also discuss alternative configurations with potential error rates that are comparable with state-of-the-art trapped ion gates.