Fast, robust and laser-free universal entangling gates for trapped-ion quantum computing

A novel two-qubit entangling gate for RF-controlled trapped-ion quantum processors is proposed theoretically and demonstrated experimentally. The speed of this gate is an order of magnitude higher than that of previously demonstrated two-qubit entangling gates in static magnetic field gradients. At the same time, the phase-modulated field driving the gate, dynamically decouples the qubits from amplitude and frequency noise, increasing the qubits' coherence time by two orders of magnitude. The gate requires only a single continuous RF field per qubit, making it well suited for scaling a quantum processor to large numbers of qubits. Implementing this entangling gate, we generate the Bell states |Φ⁺ and |Ψ⁺ in ≤ 313 μs with fidelities up to 98⁺²₋₃ % in a static magnetic gradient of only 19.09 T/m. At higher magnetic field gradients, the entangling gate speed can be further improved to match that of laser-based counterparts.