Closed-loop control for two-qubit gates with trapped ions

Abstract

State-of-the-art two-qubit gates with trapped ions employ open-loop control that rely on simplified models to precompute control sequences. Our aim is to introduce closed-loop control for two-qubit gates to correct disturbances as they occur during the gate implementation. We introduce a spectator ion into the ion chain used for quantum logic processing, where it couples with the other ions through collective motional modes. The spectator ion's position is continuously monitored by driving dipole transitions and detecting the resultant fluorescence. We show that incorporating a spectator ion is feasible for linear Paul trap implementations and is expected to reduce the two-qubit gate Bell-state preparation infidelity by an order of magnitude with the deleterious effects of position monitoring being negligible compared to the thermal effects that exist in the system, even in the absence of the spectator ions. Mathematically, we describe driven ion-trap dynamics, including the spectator ion, by a stochastic quantum master equation involving the amplitude-modulation multimode-motional coupling gate, motional drift, thermal effects, recoil from photon scattering, spontaneous decay, and light shift. Our on-the-fly control method employs reinforcement learning with the reward function based on the actual geometric phase of the spectator ion. A key advantage of our approach is that we introduce a control method that involves `learning' and correcting disturbances happening in the trap on-the-fly, thus achieving high-fidelity gates. Our approach will lead to a significantly higher two-qubit gate fidelity at a reduced calibration overhead owing to the small parameter drift in the control system.