Thesis Dissertation Defense

Abstract: Trapped ion systems are a strong candidate for quantum information processing due to the long lifetimes of their internal electronic states, which can be treated as two-level quantum system called a qubit. Trapped ions and atoms are unique among other physical quantum information platforms because their position is not fixed, and they can be spatially manipulated with electric fields. This characteristic is widely used in logic-passive operations such as ion loading and transport between different regions in a trap, but it is not often actively incorporated into qubit manipulations. This thesis describes research into techniques that take advantage of transport operations to produce one- and two-qubit operations on two co-trapped calcium-40 ions. The first technique involves single-ion addressing achieved via sequences of laser pulses and modulations of the confining electric field potential; I describe my contributions to lowering the motional heating during the potential modulations and applying the single-ion addressing technique to perform quantum process tomography. The second transport-enhanced technique is the first demonstration of a two-qubit entangling gate performed on ions during transport; I outline the experimental methods used to characterize and tailor the transport to achieve entanglement during the interaction.