Temporally multiplexed ion-photon quantum interface via fast ion-chain transport

High-rate remote entanglement between photon and matter-based qubits is essential for distributed quantum information processing. A key technique to increase the modest entangling rates of existing long-distance quantum networking approaches is multiplexing. Here, we demonstrate a temporally multiplexed ion-photon interface via rapid transport of a chain of nine calcium ions across 74 μ m within 86 μ s. The non-classical nature of the multiplexed photons is verified by measuring the second-order correlation function with an average value of g⁽²⁾(0) = 0.060(13), indicating negligible crosstalk between the multiplexed modes. In addition, we characterize the motional degree-of-freedom of the ion crystal after transport and find that it is coherently excited to as much as n̄_α≈ 110 for the center-of-mass mode. Our proof-of-principle implementation paves the way for large-scale quantum networking with trapped ions, but highlights some challenges that must be overcome.