Increasing Qubit Count and Connectivity Without Sacrificing Fidelity

Trapped ions are a leading platform for quantum information processing with long coherence times and high fidelity and fast gates. Ions trapped in the same harmonic share quantized modes that can be used to mediate all-to-all connectivity. In practice, however, quantum information processing with long ion chains suffers from increased errors. These errors are often overlooked in proof-of-principle experiments, but will be showstoppers for megaQubit scale quantum technologies. In this talk we will discuss two such error sources and ways to reduce them: (1) optical crosstalk between control beam and (2) collisions with background gas molecules.