arXiv subjects

Pablo Viñas

Publications and source records attributed to Pablo Viñas.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Entangling ions with engineered light gradients

Spectral crowding of collective motional modes limits the fidelity of entangling interactions in trapped-ion quantum processors by inducing off-resonant coupling to spectator modes. We introduce a geometric-phase entangling interaction driven by a transverse, time-dependent structured-light force. By applying the force in a plane orthogonal to the optical propagation direction, we reduce the effects of spectral crowding while preserving single-ion addressing. The scheme is compatible with arbitrary qubit encodings, provided that the qubit states experience a differential AC Stark shift. We experimentally realise high-fidelity two-qubit gates with error rates below $5\times10^{-3}$ in ion crystals containing up to 12 ions confined within a single potential well. These results establish gradient-field light-shift gates as a scalable approach to high-fidelity entangling generation in spectrally crowded trapped-ion systems.

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arXiv2026

Real-time collisions of fractional charges in a trapped-ion Jackiw-Rebbi field theory

We propose and analyze a trapped-ion quantum simulator of the Jackiw-Rebbi model, a paradigmatic quantum field theory in (1+1) dimensions where solitonic excitations of a scalar field can bind fermionic zero modes leading to fractionally-charged excitations. In our approach, the scalar field is a coarse-grained description of the planar zigzag ion displacements in the vicinity of a structural phase transition. The internal electronic states of the ions encode spins with interactions mediated by the transverse phonons and in-plane spin-phonon couplings with a zigzag pattern, which together correspond to a Yukawa-coupled Dirac field. Instead of assuming a fixed soliton background, we study the effect of back-reaction and quantum fluctuations on the coupled dynamics of the full fermion-boson system. We start by applying a Born-Oppenheimer approximation to obtain an effective Peierls-Nabarro potential for the topological kink, unveiling how the fermionic back-reaction can lead to localization of the kink. Beyond this limit, a truncated Wigner approximation combined with fermionic Gaussian states captures the quantum spreading and localization of a kink and kink-antikink scattering. Our results reveal how back-reaction and quantum fluctuations modify the stability and real-time evolution of fractionalized fermions, predicting experimentally accessible signatures in current trapped-ion architectures.

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arXiv2025

Context-aware gate set tomography: Improving the self-consistent characterization of trapped-ion universal gate sets by leveraging non-Markovianity

To progress in the characterization of noise for current quantum computers, gate set tomography (GST) has emerged as a self-consistent tomographic protocol that can accurately estimate the complete set of noisy quantum gates, state preparations, and measurements. In its original incarnation, GST improves the estimation precision by applying the gates sequentially, provided that the noise makes them a set of fixed completely-positive and trace preserving (CPTP) maps independent of the history of previous gates in the sequence. This 'Markovian' assumption is sometimes in conflict with experimental evidence, as there might be time-correlated noise leading to non-Markovian dynamics or, alternatively, slow drifts and cumulative calibration errors that lead to context dependence, such that the CP-divisible maps composed during a sequence actually change with the circuit depth. In this work, we address this issue for trapped-ion devices with phonon-mediated two-qubit gates. By a detailed microscopic modeling of high-fidelity light-shift gates, we tailor GST to capture the main source of context dependence: motional degrees of freedom. Rather than invalidating GST, we show that context dependence can be incorporated in the parametrization of the gate set, allowing us to reduce the sampling cost of GST. Our results identify a promising research avenue that might be applicable to other platforms where microscopic modeling can be incorporated: the development of a context-aware GST.

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