This thesis describes theoretical and experimental work whose main aim is the development of techniques for using trapped <sup>43</sup>Ca⁺ ions for quantum information processing. I present a rate equations model of <sup>43</sup>Ca⁺, and compare it with experimental data. The model is then used to investigate and optimise an electron-shelving readout method from a ground-level hyperfine qubit. The process is robust against common experimental imperfections. A shelving fidelity of up to 99.97% is theoretically possible, taking 100 μs. The laser pulse sequence can be greatly simplified for only a small reduction in the fidelity. The simplified method is tested experimentally with fidelities up to 99.8%. The shelving procedure could be applied to other commonly-used species of ion qubit. An entangling two-qubit quantum controlled-phase gate was attempted between a <sup>40</sup>Ca⁺ and a <sup>43</sup>Ca⁺ ion. The experiment did not succeed due to frequent decrystallisation of the ion pair, and strong motional decoherence. The source of the problems was never identified despite significant experimental effort, and the decision was made to suspend the experiments and continue them in an improved ion trap which is under construction. A sequence of pi-pulses, inspired by the Hahn spin-echo, was derived that is capable of greatly reducing dephasing of any qubit. If the qubit precession frequency varies with time as an nth-order polynomial, an (n+1) pulse sequence is theoretically capable of perfectly cancelling the resulting phase error. The sequence is used on a 43Ca+ magnetic-field-sensitive hyperfine qubit, with 20 pulses increasing the coherence time by a factor of 75 compared to an experiment without any spin-echo. In our ambient noise environment the well-known Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill dynamic-decoupling method was found to be comparably effective.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:515002 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Szwer, David James |
| Contributors | Lucas, David M. |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:21178e0f-637e-46b8-8448-3cbce78460ff : http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/users/iontrap/pubs/theses/DSzwerthesis.pdf |
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