Trapped ions for quantum computing and molecular spectroscopy

Trapped ions have made steady progress to the point of implementing simple encoding and error correcting schemes. Challenges now lie in engineering larger and scalable systems for calculations beyond single operations. One trend is to employ surface electrode traps with complex geometry: we studied ion motion control and heating on a Sandia Y trap. As ion number and operation complexity grow, an expandable control system is necessary manage multiple ion qubits, ranging from a few to tens: we are developing a master-slave architecture to handle parallel qubit operations based on our current controller. We are also developing a dual tone DDS to implement Raman operations more efficiently on Yb+ ion qubits. The atomic physics tool box and the long interrogation time make ion traps ideal for molecular ion spectroscopy. We studied CaH+ ion's vibrational and rotational spectrums using REMPD. We use both large crystals with a few hundred ions, and three ion crystals that can track every single molecular reaction/dissociation event. ​