Control and Readout of High-Dimensional Trapped Ion Qudits
The trapped ion platform is one of the quantum computing platforms that is at the forefront for realizing large-scale quantum information processing, which is crucial for practically actualizing the advantages of quantum algorithms. Scaling up the trapped ion quantum computing architecture remains a challenge. We explore an alternative avenue in a trapped ion system for increasing the computational Hilbert space other than trapping more ions, which is by increasing the qudit dimension of an ion. Our ion of choice is 137Ba+, which has a rich energy level structure for high-dimensional qudit encoding. Utilizing the additional energy states found in 137Ba+ also comes with non-trivial complexities that require careful considerations, which we have solved and report in this work. We report on a single-shot state measurement protocol which allows qudit encoding in 137Ba+ of up to 25 levels, and demonstrate state preparation and measurement of up to 13 levels, which is unprecedented in a trapped ion system. This PhD defense presentation also covers some other interesting topics within the thesis, which include our experimental setup, barium ion loading via laser ablation, and detailed studies of some experimental observations that may not be intuitively clear.
Supervisor:
Crystal Senko